“I offer a genuine insight into how you can, and should, be a rational, science-believing human being and at the same time know that you are also an immortal spiritual being, a spark of God. I propose a worldview that offers a way out of the hate and fear-driven violence engulfing the planet.”
“The porcelain rose is not as pretty as the one that decays.”
Source: Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
“Creating doesn't make us unhappy, unhappiness makes us creative. To create is to live, and in living, we want only to creat more, to set our foundations depper and reach higher toward the sky. If sadness is what makes us creative, then sadness is nothing else but life.”
“American seekers of happiness are in danger of deluding themselves into believing that only one part of the world exists, the part that gladdens their egos.”
Source: Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
“When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers
“But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers
“No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers
“But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers
“The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers
“In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to.”
Source: The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers
