Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It s...tops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all. The kind of work that Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe, or more recently, that Verna Fields did for Stephen Spielberg, doesn't get done in life. Even in a literary age like the nineteenth century it never occurred to anyone to posit God as Editor, useful as the metaphor might have been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I will keep America moving forward, always forward--for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of l...ight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one, a savage city, yet it had such tenderness, a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of ...stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he h...as a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There had been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous--and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child o...f grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The confirmation of Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative voices to be added to the [Supreme] Court in recent memory, carr...ies a sobering message for the African- American community.... As he begins to make his mark upon the lives of African Americans, we must acknowledge that his successful nomination is due in no small measure to the support he received from black Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Judge Thomas was a man who had used the system to get where he wanted to be, but then felt that everyone else should pull themselv...es up by their own bootstraps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which [Clarence] Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from... the table, at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my coke?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »