The Writer - More Especially The Novelist

Fear Is The Deep Motive Of Abstract Art - Fear Of A Repellent Civilization Which Is Dominated By The Power Of Things. ... Who Can Be Surprised If, More Sensitive Than The Others, The Artist Is Terrified By The Power Things Have Acquired Over Us?

In What Touches Their Social Convictions, Most Persons Do Not Think. The Threat Of Change, With All It Suggests To Them In The Loss Of Social And Economic Privilege, Alarms So Deeply That They Are Incapable Of Unprejudiced Thought. They Seem To Themselves To Be Thinking, With Lucidity And Fairness, But Since They Start From The Conviction That Change Must Undoubtedly Be For The Worse Or From Settled Grief At The Thought Of Losing What Is Old And Lovely, They Are Doing No More Than Following A Logical Sequence Of Ideas From A False Premise.

Only One Person In A Thousand Knows The Trick Of Really Living In The Present. Most Of Us Spend Fifty-nine Minutes An Hour Living In The Past, With Regret For Lost Joys Or Shame For Things Badly Done (both Utterly Useless And Weakening) Or In A Future Which We Either Long For Or Dread. . . . There Is Only One Minute In Which You Are Alive, This Minute, Here And Now. The Only Way To Live Is By Accepting Each Minute As An Unrepeatable Miracle. Which Is Exactly What It Is-a Miracle And Unrepeatable.

As Often As Not Our Whole Self...engages Itself In The Most Trivial Of Things, The Shape Of A Particular Hill, A Road In The Town In Which We Lived As Children, The Movement Of Wind In Grass. The Things We Shall Take With Us When We Die Will Nearly All Be Small Things.

The Impossible Talked Of Is Less Impossible From The Moment Words Are Laid To It.