“Sadness is a vice.”

"A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role" in The Observer (29 June 1958)
Context: I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Source: Good Morning, Midnight

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Quoted in Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde by Jonathan Weinberg (Yale University Press, 1993).

"Arizona's Pioneer Senator". New York Times (June 1, 1962)

What the Butler Saw (1969), Act II

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Sermons