The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection. And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time. The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action. Naught is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me. If only we could have two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them. Never have ideas about children -- and never have ideas for them. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread. A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification. After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else. All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true. |