Timequake

Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."

Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, "art or not," you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. [...] The situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. [...] There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. [...] If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not their pictureness. [...]

There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.

"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate. If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it.

I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

If this isn't nice, what is?

Why throw money at problems? That's what money is for.Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

I am eternally grateful [...] for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

Artists [...] are people who say "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.

I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife.

There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, "The Beatles did."

The British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: The believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating. I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: "Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!"

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.