Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perver….

When you make a bet, you're saying something..

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully….

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady d….

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients..

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but ….

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade..

Divorce transforms habit into drama..

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since ….

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, dest….

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life..

I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck..

The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be..

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level..

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money..

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems esse….

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money..

Hold'em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with..

When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself. You pause and attend….

I'm good at reading people..