Musings on the Artist's Life

In Italy, for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

I’m not alone when I’m writing – the language itself, like a kind of trampoline, is there helping me.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?