People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.
Well, you know, I played Mufasa in the workshop of The Lion King.
You know, when you do standup there are certain requirements that you have to do like you have to go on stage and when you get introduced you have to say "Hey,how ya doin'? How are ya?" I couldn't do it. It was false.