Great Throughts Treasury

"Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play."

"Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world."

"Future? Homer said. He was a little embarrassed because all his life, from day to day, he had been busy mapping out a future, even if it was only a future for the next day. Well, he said, I don't know for sure, but I guess I'd like to be somebody someday."

"He (George Bernard Shaw) was a gentle, delicate, kind, little man who had established a pose, and then lived it so steadily and effectively that the pose had become real. Like myself, his nature has been obviously a deeply troubled one in the beginning. He had been a man who had seen the futility, meaninglessness and sorrow of life but had permitted himself to thrust aside these feelings and to perform another George Bernard Shaw, which is art and proper."

"Have no shame in being kindly or gentle."

"Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior"

"He knew the truth and was looking for something better."

"Good things died as they were being born."

"He paints for the blind, and we are the blind, and he lets us see for sure what we saw long ago but weren't sure we saw. He paints for the dead, to remind us that — great good God, think of it — we're alive, and on our way to weather, from the sea to the hot interior, to watermelon there, a bird at night chasing a child past flowering cactus, a building on fire, barking dogs, and guitar-players not playing at eight o'clock, every picture saying, "Did you live, man? Were you alive back there for a little while? Good for you, good for you, and wasn't it hot, though? Wasn't it great when it was hot, though?""

"He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops."

"He was just a young man who'd come to town on a donkey, bored to death or something, who'd taken advantage of the chance to be entertained by a small-town kid who was bored to death, too. That's the only way I could figure it out without accepting the general theory that he was crazy."

"He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see."

"He's finding out, he's doing all right, he'll go to school but nobody's going to teach him anything."

"He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship."

"How did money ever happen? What's it mean? What's it for?"

"How did roses ever happen?"

"Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met."

"I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all."

"I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death."

"How do you figure? The clerk said. Don't bother me, I said. I'm the night manager of this office and when I tell you something it's final."

"I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money."

"I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know."

"I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little."

"I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant."

"I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?"

"I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me."

"I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it."

"I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death."

"I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign."

"I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it."

"I care so much about everything that I care about nothing."

"I believed from the beginning of remembered experience that I was somebody with an incalculable potential for enlargement, somebody who both knew and could find out, upon whom demands could be made with the expectation of having them fulfilled."

"I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire."

"I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness."

"I do not believe in races."

"I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?"

"I didn't earn one dollar by any means other than writing... If an editor liked a story as I had written it, he could buy it. If he wanted parts of it written over, I did not do that work. I have never been subsidized… I have never accepted money connected with a literary prize or award… Once I was urged by friends to file an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship... My application was turned down and I began to breathe freely again."

"I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market."

"I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel."

"I felt at the same time, and pretty much constantly, that I was nothing in relation to Enormity, the Unknown, and the Unknowable. I was too vulnerable, too lacking in power, a thing of subtle reality, liable to be blown away without a moment's warning, a migrant with no meaning, no guide, no counsel, an entity in continuous transition, a growing thing whose stages of growth always went unnoticed, a fluid and flawed thing. Thus, there could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all. I did frequently rejoice in the recognition, but I may have gotten that from some of the Protestant hymns I had heard, and knew, and had sung, such as Joy to the World. The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too."

"I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being."

"I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it."

"I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed."

"I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity."

"I had three secrets and sold them all."

"I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive."

"I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?"

"I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever."

"I have frequently misunderstood things."

"I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. The quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on."