Letters to monica Quotes

“Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.”

“There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!”

“Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.”

“I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.”

“I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.”

“Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.”

“You know, I know I should be just as panicky as you about the filthy work - one wants to do nothing in the evenings, certainly not spread rotten books around & dredge for a 'line'. It must be like still being a student, with an essay to do after a week's drinking, only you haven't had the drinking. Quite clearly, to me, you aren't a voluntary worker, from the will: you do it by intuitive flashes, more like an act of creation, & when the flashes don't come, as of course they don't, especially when the excess energy of undergraduate days is gone, then it is a hideous unnatural effort.”

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”

“In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.”