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 »
There is assuredly no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, wit...h men of real power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all ...thoughts. Not a select party.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 »
Happiness lies outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one's goal, not self-ab...sorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of an irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good.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 »