The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers all alone in their studios with no one watching.
I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone let him be where he will.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality and on nothing else.
About the time I turned 50 I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.
I think you can't really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child whether it's New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can't escape it even if you completely disagree with it you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them however has not changed.
New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age the airplane the atom bomb the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.
Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money it is all profit it completes our education founds and fosters our friendships and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.
Each age it is found must write its own books or rather each generation for the next succeeding.
He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it's bottled.