Grand Sweeping Statements
These Grand Sweeping Statements are taken from A Thought Book, 100 pages of epigrams and half-epigrams compiled from the hip-pocket journals I've kept over the last 20-odd years…
- There are many who believe poetry to be a kind of special secret operation performed by snobs.
- To be a good writer you must be well-fed, well-sexed-- and yet inconsolable.
- For an artist in the end, taste is almost everything.
- You must decide: do you want to understand, or do you want to create?
- Cultural success (the 'fattening of the artist') is deemed unfair by some because it is unnatural-and the 'natural types' feel this keenly and resent it-they very much resent all these unnaturally-strong talented types getting animal rewards (sex) for patently non-animal work.
- The intellectual's job? To stand for principles no matter what the context? Or is the intellectual really so separate from the rest of humanity that he can ignore the context?
- Just as much evil comes from people refusing to exercise power as from people grasping for it.
- There is some truth in this untrue statement: The world isn't dangerous if we don't love.
- Artistic maturity can only be achieved alone, in many rooms through many years.
- I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking for true art; there is a difference.
- It's the media machine, not the world, that has become larger than the power of a writer to digest.
- The liars and bullies want art that 'reflects their values'.
- The general tenor of Christianity-that man is a greedy, fallen, selfish, sinful improvident creature who must eventually face the consequences of his deeds-has been proved generally true by all the recent findings of environmental science.
- Like most white Americans these days, he was vain about having suffered.
- The two sources of violence: sadists and victims. The first, in this reading at least, have not known violence and so are free to fantasize and enact it upon others. The second have known violence, and done so to the point that they have lost their feeling for it, so that it has changed them into progenitors of violence simply because that is what they do.
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