40 quotes
What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get lost forever.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before he can actually do it.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
The odds on any intelligent person having an unhappy childhood are better than fair, and the odds on a sad ending are practically off the board.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.
The House That George Built (2007)
People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subjects, which it is up to the writer to find.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The 1930s — a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
A Broadway play is so much an event, designed down to the bit parts to explode in your face on one particular night, that it is hard to judge any one of them fairly from the scrawny instructions known as a script.
Clare Boothe Luce (1982)
The one kind of society that the Church cannot adjust to is no society at all, i.e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television.
Essays in Disguise (1990)
I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?
It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.
In Love with Daylight (1995)
Happy the man with a book-length grievance — and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)