Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
Source: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 16: The Coming of Winter
“He liked everything about the university except the students.”
Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 19 “Channel Two’s Popularity” (p. 162)
“It's hot. And there's a lot of it. I like everything about it except the flavor.”
Bill Budd, on the ship's gruel.
Billy Budd (1962)
“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”
Source: Middlemarch
“Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
Source: My Double Life (1907), Ch. 28 <!-- p. 324 -->
Context: Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrity when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but they know how to hold in check that monster advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public when it is vomiting its black gall. But those who are caught in the clutches of celebrity at the age of twenty two know nothing.
“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.”
