[b]Nathanael West
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.[/b]
In other words, her lies.
Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.
Of course you still have to be good at it.
He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.
Mine would rock it too.
You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one–like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail–making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.
Scripted in other words. A character.
But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.
Probably not a good thing. But maybe it is.
I’m going to be a star some day, she announced as though daring him to contradict her.
I’m sure you…
It’s my life. It’s the only thing in the whole world that I want.
It’s good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but…
If I’m not, I’ll commit suicide.
Probably already has.