The Infinite Library

“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

“When I stop [working], the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm working.”

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”

“You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.”

“Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it.... Success is shy-it won't come out while you're watching.”

“All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”

“Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.”

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”

“High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

“We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”

“The future is called 'perhaps', which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

“Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”

“I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.”

“And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.”

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.”

“Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.”

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

“It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.”

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”

“We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.”

“If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.”

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”

“Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.”

“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!”

“I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.”

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”

“All good art is an indiscretion.”

“Luck is believing you're lucky.”

“I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.”

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”

“Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.”

“A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

“All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.”

“The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be....”

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

“To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”

“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”

“Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.”

“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.”

“Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.”

“Don't look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes, you'll know you're dead.”