I'm not interested in the heroes or the villains. I'm interested in playing people.
And whoever forces himself to love anybody begets a murderer in his own body.
The dead don't die. They look on and help.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation.
The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.
I'm told I either look bigger than I do on television or that I look smaller than I look on television. No one seems to think I look the same size.
Any thief or criminal or robber who enters another country in order to steal should expect to be exposed to murder at any time. For the American forces to expect anything from me personally reflects a very narrow perception.
You don't need Tom Wolfe to tell you that the Buckhead section of Atlanta is the jewel of the city, an area of gracious homes, elegant hotels and shopping centers, as well as some of the best restaurants.