As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?