Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it.
I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.
What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.
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