124 quotes
Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Ancient Evenings (1983)
Mysteries are irritated by facts.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Barbary Shore (1951)
The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.
Barbary Shore (1951)
I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits."
Barbary Shore (1951)
Pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history?
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
The people who worked for NASA ... were ... part of that vast convocation of Americans, probably a majority, whom one saw in New York only on television.
A Fire on the Moon (1970)
I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.
The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956)
I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort.
TIME interview (1991)
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
The Presidential Papers (1963)
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Ancient Evenings (1983)
The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
Barbary Shore (1951)
You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
He was a fool — a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.
Barbary Shore (1951)
The novelist, thinks Sam, perspiring beneath blankets, must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all. The feminine in his nature cries out for proof he is a man; he loves himself and therefore despises all that he is.
The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956)
I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt … that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.
I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved.
TIME interview (1991)