When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Ri...viera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, or Ed Whelen, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men--especially pipers;... And, whether they pipe us free, from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and ...once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not b...ecause the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny.... He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw.... He is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all these things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that is in his eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must... be paid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be... damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »