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a slither of this book goes straight into my soul,
A book which doesn’t leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn’t add some permanent treasure to the world, isn’t worth doing.
their courage mostly fear.
thou hast only the right to work;
Experience has its dangers: it may bring wisdom, but it may also bring stiffness and cause hardened deposits in the mind, and its resulting inelasticity is crippling.
creation can only proceed from sincerity.
the narrative equivalent of surround sound.
books are stuff and life is stupid.
What is universal and timeless in literature is need
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
infinitely deferred.
reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.
Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyse the pleasures that both sides know?”)
“one should notice and fondle details.”
“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.
“it is almost always too late in Kafka.”
Even our demystifications of Kafka are full of mystery.
Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time—I doubt that I am a human being.
It’s a novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it knows.
One day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report.
I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last.
He never feared influence—he devoured influences.
War makes people go out of their proper and natural way.
I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” said Cary Grant. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
Virtue is nothing but a just temper between propensities any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice.
“There are men of action and men of thought, and if you ever get a combination of the two, well, that’s the top—you’ve
I don’t move, I don’t do anything. I just am.”
She would be myth or nothing at all.
“The thing standing between me and genius is me.”
He is a writer: a man who tells the truth by lying.
To watch Astaire is to gasp.
Of all the fantasies and dreams people have of a life in Hollywood, it seemed odd that no one had thought to dream a career like the one just described.
The dream persists, even as reality asserts itself.
being committed to, as he puts it, the future,
an ordinary man’s experience of extremity.
when wars are fought, perfectly normal people fight them.
I only remember the obscure stuff.”
Great situation comedy expands in the imagination.
The funniest thing about dying is how much we, the living, ask of the dying;
Comedy is a Lazarus art;
“Life is endless, until you die”—Edith
There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us!
You don’t have to be funny to live here, but it helps.
he ended up with little more than he had started with.
good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Wallace was clever enough to realize that cleverness alone wasn’t enough
they release you from the obligation of having to read the book.
His reader needs to think of herself as a musician, spreading the sheet music—the gift of the work—over the music stand, electing to play. First there is practice, then competency at the instrument, then spending time with the sheet music, then playing it over and over.
