Novelists From New York City

"One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language."

"To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded."

"The insight that the largest, deepest, widest imaginative faculty of all is what you need to be a monotheist teaches me that you simply cannot be a Jew if you repudiate the imagination."

"It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!"

"Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past."

"In the middle of the war there was Heine, there was Goethe, there was Schiller. I did posters for the German club, in the middle of the war. When I think back to how happy I was, studying German and flunking algebra, and I think what was going on for other Jewish teenagers on the other side of the world, I'm so puzzled by those dates."

"I think the word is intractable. I blame the lack of live and let live. And which side is it coming from more than the other side? I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels. That's how it strikes me." Was she moved the first time she went to Israel? "Yes. Probably not like my father, who was simply swept away. He couldn't get over that he had ascended Mount Zion. I don't see any solution here. I'm despairing. That's where I stand."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) There are too many to be tempted to isolate only one, so here are five: “Lighea” (sometimes titled “The Professor and the Mermaid”), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade; Chekhov’s “Ward Six”; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (everyone’s autobiography)."

"(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “History of the Jews,” by Heinrich Graetz…it taught me that a writer lacking history, however gifted, is an empty sack."

"We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution. ("Justice to Feminism")"

"We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. ("Justice to Feminism")"

"I don't think one writes for immortality. I think beginning writers always think they will have fame. But if fame — which is power — is what you want, then you'll get it, probably. But it's not something necessary to want or need."

"Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self."

"I've read...some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick."

"“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”"

"In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it."

"A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves."

"Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim."

"“And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?” “There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”"

"Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble."

"In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl."

"Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves."

"One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too."

"I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love."

"One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests."

"I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them."

"They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished—bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara—she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy—and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer."

"“You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?” “Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?” “Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it—that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it—devil-worship—but never will they respect it except superstitiously.”"

"Patience is a narcotic for the weak."

"One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either."

"What hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away."

"A crisis passed usually means another one approached."

"At one point early in his journal Dr. Bannerman describes himself as “a naturalist of the puttering type—I would rather sit on a log then write monographs: it pays off better.”"

"Never, beautiful Earth, never even at the height of the human storms have I forgotten you, my planet Earth, your forests and your fields, your oceans, the serenity of your mountains; the meadows, the continuing rivers, the incorruptible promise of returning spring."

"Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired pain that is brief release from trouble."

"She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking."

"The three billion crawl about, all over the helpless earth, destroying and defiling, killing the forests, polluting the air with smoke and radioactive dust and the torturing noises of the machine. In place of meadows, filling stations. The lakes are puddles of human filth. Two years ago the whole area of San Francisco Harbor was covered with dead fish: even the ocean is sick from the human taint, and this they call progress."

"I see them as they are. There’s no truth in them. They project the wishes of a little greedy ape against the blank of eternity, and call it truth—there’s triviality if you like. They invent a larger ape somewhat beyond the clouds,—or somewhat beyond the Galaxy, which is the same thing—and call it God; they use this invention as an authority, to justify every vice of cruelty or greed or vanity or lust that their small minds can imagine. They talk of justice, and say that their laws derive from a sense of justice (which they have never defined); but no human law ever derived from anything except fear—fear of the unknown, the different, the difficult, fear of man’s own self. They make war, not for any of the noisy noble reasons they produce, but simply because they hate themselves almost as much as they hate their neighbors. They gibber of love, love, but human love is merely one more projection of the ape-self, superimposed on the invented image of another person."

"I admit almost every charge of the indictment. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s too partial, too trivial. You’ve spent your life hunting for counterfeit money in a pile of treasure. You looked for evil all your life, to prove your case—naturally you found it, and where it was absent you created it. Any fool can do that. I’ve looked for good in human nature and elsewhere, and found it, heaped up and flowing over. Anyone can do that too, though good may be a little harder to see, because it’s all around you, no further away than the nearest leaf, the nearest smile or pleasant word, no further away than every breath of air. You say there’s no truth in men. Do you know what truth is, any more than Pilate did? Human beings are in the early stages of trying to accept and understand empirical truth."

"If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time."

"“Propaganda is bad art.” “Aren’t you thinking in terms of music, though?” “No. In music the problem just doesn’t exist. You don’t even start looking for propaganda in music unless your head’s already addled.” “Yes, but in art—well, Daumier, Goya, Hogarth—” “They live,” said Sharon, “because they were good artists. If their social ideas had been the kind we don’t happen to like in the twentieth century, their work would last just the same. Cellini was a louse. The piety of Blake and El Greco almost doesn’t exist nowadays. Their work does.”"

"I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches."

"Haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves?"

"After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior."

"You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it."

"Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?"

"They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk."

"I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?"

"“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.” “If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”"

"If there must be blame, then all citizens—you, I, everyone—are responsible for letting it be that kind of world, for not placing ethical development ahead of every other kind. We understand ethical necessities quite well; we’ve been capable of understanding them for several thousand years; but we haven’t been willing to let them rule our actions—it’s that simple."