“The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to.”

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down ― the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.”

“The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can life the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.”

“Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.”

“A man should begin with his own times. He should become acquainted first of all with the world in which he is living and participating. He should not be afraid of reading too much or too little. He should take his reading as he does his food or his exercise. The good reader will gravitate to the good books. He will discover from his contemporaries what is inspiring or fecundating, or merely enjoyable, in past literature. He should have the pleasure of making these discoveries on his own, in his own way. What has worth, charm, beauty, wisdom, cannot be lost or forgotten. But things can lose all value, all charm and appeal, if one is dragged to them by the scalp.”

“An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”

“It’s like a man in the trenchesagain: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, becauseif he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on justthe same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and hasadmitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even justhis bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’dslaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why.”