I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and ...background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be r...emembered for remembering someone else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He said "Next time can I bring my friend?" And I thought "Does he mean friend?"... And I thought "Yes he does mean friend." Which was quite bold in those days. It was the Dark Ages. Men and men. And they could still put you in prison for it. And did, dear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significa...nce of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the ...cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ea...rs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down.... If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter's life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable,... and must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »