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I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know.
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.
The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.
That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.
The biggest truth to face now—what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life—is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves,
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
George Bernard Shaw said about this planet.” “Which was?” “He said, ‘I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.’
“We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we’re making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are. I think the planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberculosis, and so on.
“The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
