In spite of much that could be ventured to the contrary it would seem overwhelmingly certain that any fulness of the good which human existence is capable of must come in a clarity and health of brain and of feeling, of self-knowledge and of knowledge of the world, as well as in any clarity of physical action: and could be arrived at only through education or self-education, using those words in senses much broader than their common ones.
And it is quite as fair to observe that ignorance and slovenliness and the tradition itself are the inevitable products of just one thing: poverty.
I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art.
Possibly the most important thing to a human being, once he is alive and possessed of the means of sustaining life, is that he should do the work he cares most to do and is best capable of doing.
Movies are made for respectable people now. (They) were better when made for lowbrows and made with instinct and delight
We’re regular meat eaters. No knickknacks, no borl nothn. Give me meat and biscuit three times a day year round and I’ll lof for ye ever day the sun shines.
I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer. That’s as sincere a thing as I’ve ever said.
He felt that although his father loved their home and loved all of them, he was more lonely than the contentment of this family love could help; that it even increased his loneliness, or made it hard for him not to be lonely.
Poverty caused their carelessness; their carelessness brings them deeper poverty.
Any definitive mystery is interesting to speculate over, and thoroughly useless to.
His eyes are a clear, ignorant, and somewhere dangerous yellow, quietly studying you.
Human life, we must assume in the first place, is somewhat more important than anything else in human life, except, possibly, what happens to it.
He cries a great deal of the time: so steadily that the crying goes unnoticed, as would the habituate noise of a nearby waterfall.
She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure.
Like many people who cannot read or write he handles words with a clumsy economy and beauty, as if they were farm animals drawing open difficult land.
On paper, all you can do is say something happened, and if you say it well enough the reader believes you. In pictures, if you do it right, the thing happens, right there on the screen.
I hear my father and my mother and they are my giants, my king and my queen, beside whom there are no others so wise and worthy or honorable or brave or beautiful in this world.
Speaking generally as well as of the Burroughses, the work clothes of the grown people become them as their own skins do. In their Good clothes they look stiff and shy, like orphans at a party.
In that country you speak of a family not as a family but as a force: and with good reason.
To me, the great thing about movies is that it’s a brand new field. I don’t see how much more can be done with writing or the stage. In fact, every kind of recognized ‘art’ has been worked pretty nearly to the limit. Of course, great things will be done in all of them, but, possibly excepting music, I don’t see how they can avoid being at least in part imitations. As for the movies, however, their possibilities are infinite.
The human organism, however, is remarkably tenacious of life, and miraculously adapted to it. In the course of adapting, it may be forced to sacrifice a few side-issues, such as the capability of thinking, of feeling emotion, or of discerning any possibilities of joy or goodness in living: but it lives.
One important function of good art or entertainment is to unite and illuminate the heart and the mind, to cause each to learn from, and to enhance, the experience of the other. Bad art and entertainment misinform and disunite them.
Still another is likewise obvious: if by education can be meant not mere schooling in facts but a profound clearing and cleaning of the mental air, a real qualifying of a human being for existence, then education is all but nonexistent, and what passes for it is merely a more or less organized dispensary of poisons which may or may not take.
The fact remains, however, that clothes are powerfully significant psychologically and socially: in every garment you see there is a badge and division of class as distinct as any uniform could effect and far more subtly exact; and a human being is shaped by the clothes he wears quite as much as by the amount of money he is accustomed to feel the presence, or lack thereof, in his pocket; and as the world is today the future of a marriageable girl, for instance, can be profoundly influenced by what clothes she can or cannot wear.