27 quotes
Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy — but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
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)
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)
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)