The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy's Complaint is a record-breaking best- seller sexua...l permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve-ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'll wager that it was impossible after we got mixed together to tell an anti from a suffragist by her clothes. There might have b...een a difference, though, in the expression of the faces and the shape of the heads.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is it enough That the dish of milk is set out at night,... That we think of him sometimes, Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why do our bodies wear out? Why can't we just go on and on and on, accumulating a potentially infinite number of Frequent Flyer mi...leage points? These are the kinds of questions that philosophers have been asking ever since they realized that being a philosopher did not involve any heavy lifting. And yet the answer is really very simple. Our bodies are mechanical devices, they break down. Some devices, such as battery-operated toys costing $39.95, break down almost instantly upon exposure to the Earth's atmosphere. Other devices, such as stereo systems owned by your next-door neighbor's 13-year-old son who likes to listen to bands with names like "Nerve Damage," at a volume capable of disintegrating limestone, will continue to function perfectly for many years, even if you hit them with an ax. But the fundamental law of physics is that sooner or later every mechanism ceases to function for one reason or another, and it is never covered under the warranty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the... facts printed in black ink.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...pleasure lies in pursuit, not in the attainment. It is because of this, that society is never satisfied, and, however, wearied,... is always on the race-track, straining every nerve to reach the goal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What an antithetical mind!--tenderness, roughness--delicacy, coarseness--sentiment, sensuality--soaring and grovelling, dirt and d...eity--all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »