These two men, seemingly so different in their public attitudes--Faulkner hugged his private life, Hemingway made his into a natio...nal epic--responded similarly to inner needs. Self-destructive drinking was a phenomenon common to many American writers besides Hemingway and Faulkner; their commonality went far deeper. Both needed confusion, near disaster, and a reaching for depths before they became pumped up for work. Hemingway by the 1930s had put most of his best work behind him. He developed and peaked well before Faulkner, and the body of his achievement is far smaller as a result, although his influence was larger. Hemingway's turbulence was exhibited on a public scale. By comparison, Faulkner's turmoil was almost invis ible, except to family members and friends near him. He demanded his privacy with the obsession of a man who feared to give away anything which was not in his books. But because his resources were kept so close to his chest, so dammed up inside, he was more suitable for the long haul. He could incubate ideas, techniques, and energies without dissipating them in a great public display. And he could move at his own rate of development.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The term "mensch" literally means a "person" or "man," but it represents a moral ideal for all people, men and women alike. . . . ...It means being sensitive to other people's needs and seeking out ways to help them. It is acquired by living close to family and extending one's sense of obligation beyond the family to the broader community. In the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe where the term arose, to call someone a mensch was the highest compliment that could be given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul an...d become richer in their humaneness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness--pushing us at intervals close to taboo and... dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never got there....... I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do no...t play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come from... such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are men from whom nature or some peculiar destiny has removed the cover beneath which we hide our own madness. They are like... thin-skinned insects whose visible play of muscles seem to make them deformed, though in fact, everything soon turns to its normal shape again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »