Great Throughts Treasury

"People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?"

"Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others."

"Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images."

"Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel."

"Present it is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity."

"Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."

"That a plot has no real life of its own; it exists only in its precipitates. It cannot be distilled but only crystallized- in which form it is then immutable, whether successful or unsuccessful: once and for all."

"The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a supra-human authority."

"Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense."

"The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language."

"The horror of uncreative solitude."

"The self-knowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life."

"The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else."

"The older you get the simpler you want to make it."

"The monstrous paradox that people come closer to one another without words."

"Theatrical effectiveness, I believe, lies in its rarity its uniqueness."

"There are moments when her voice is all he needs."

"There is no art without Eros."

"There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot."

"Uniforms ruin every character."

"We were calling for manpower and people came."

"They wanted what is possible only once: the now."

"To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us."

"To write is to read one's own self."

"We nest in an accident whose precarious valance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us."

"What makes Shakespeare so overwhelming is the way in which the situation (who is confronting whom) is usually itself part of the composition, meaningful already as a situation."

"What hope have you know given up?"

"What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive."

"When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?"

"Where the works gives scope for individuality, one sees a blossoming of self-respect."

"Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it."

"You can lose a woman when you have won her."

"You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely."

"You merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from another affair.'"

"You can put anything into words, except your own life."

"You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself."

"Your virtuous living is your enemy's best and cheapest weapon."