I Want To Die Violently Instead Of

I Hope I Haven't Given You The Impression That I Consider Kissing Intrinsically Irrational.

They Were Still In The Happier Stage Of Love. They Were Full Of Brave Illusions About Each Other, Tremendous Illusions, So That The Communion Of Self With Self Seemed To Be On A Plane Where No Other Human Relations Mattered. They Both Seemed To Have Arrived There With An Extraordinary Innocence As Though A Series Of Pure Accidents Had Driven Them Together, So Many Accidents That At Last They Were Forced To Conclude That They Were For Each Other. They Had Arrived With Clean Hands, Or So It Seemed, After No Traffic With The Merely Curious And Clandestine.

A Writer Like Me Must Have An Utter Confidence, An Utter Faith In His Star. It's An Almost Mystical Feeling, A Feeling Of Nothing-can-happen-to Me, Nothing-can-touch-me.... I Once Had It. But Through A Series Of Blows, Many Of Them My Own Fault, Something Happened To That Sense Of Immunity And I Lost My Grip.

...the Test Of A First-rate Intelligence Is The Ability To Hold Two Opposed Ideas In The Mind At The Same Time, And Still Retain The Ability To Function. One Should, For Example, Be Able To See That Things Are Hopeless And Yet Be Determined To Make Them Otherwise. This Philosophy Fitted On To My Early Adult Life, When I Saw The Improbable, The Implausible, Often The "impossible," Come True.

When The First-rate Author Wants An Exquisite Heroine Or A Lovely Morning, He Finds That All The Superlatives Have Been Worn Shoddy By His Inferiors. It Should Be A Rule That Bad Writers Must Start With Plain Heroines And Ordinary Mornings, And, If They Are Able, Work Up To Something Better.