The Ironic Gnome

I drink to make other people more interesting.

The writer, and no one else, has responsibility for what he writes. That he may experiment and stop being a mere illustration.

I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Do people cry out
not because they’re afraid
to fall, but because
they delight
in their safety and know
they won’t?

Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

There is a time, when passing through a light, that you walk in your own shadow.