Millie? Does the White Clown love you?

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.He was moving from an unreality that was frightening...

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And...

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for...

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here...

See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.

She was a woman with a broom or a dust-pan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You sawher cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or yousaw her setting out...

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer...

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Whatever she is now she’s better than she was,” said Bedloe. “Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

For if we’re destroyed, the knowledge is dead…We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books…so many pages to a person…

Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on...

The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills. For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling...

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Biz Dünyalılar, büyük ve güzel şeyleri yıkmak konusunda hünerliyizdir.

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the...

My stories run up and bite me on the leg-I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

…trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children’s...

A woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”Walter cried back at her, “Hello, oh Lord, hello!””This is a recording,” recited the woman’s voice. “Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message on the wire spool...

Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. “May I ask you a question?””Yes.””Have you ever thought you were Christ?””I can’t say that I have. But I have considered that God was...

Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?””Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.

Isn’t this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood...

How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to...

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That...

You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on.

He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it...

Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.

Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the door and stepped in.They stopped.The library deeps lay waiting for them.Out in the world, not much...

We’re all fools,” said Clemens, “all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this...

Every story I’ve written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

No,” said a voice, “the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.

Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.””Oh, they don’t miss me,” she said. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends...

I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.

Be your own self. Love what YOU love.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.

Hello!” He said hello and then said, “What are you up to now?” “I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. “I don’t think I’d like that,” he said. “You...

You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be...

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.