Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane.
Nathanael WestAt college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.
Nathanael WestBut whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.
Nathanael WestYou once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.
Nathanael West