 It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir. |
| It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things. |
| To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in. |
| Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing. |
| The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble. |
| The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary. |
| Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed. |
| There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him. |
| Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane. |
| I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots. |
| Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring. |
| Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip. |
| Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. |
| All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. |
| If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. |
| We live at the edge of the miraculous. |
| We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. |
| The world is the mirror of myself dying. |
| Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?' |
| What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature. |
