When I think of something funny, if I want to remember it, I have to go get and pen and write it down. Or, if the pen's too far away, I have to convince myself myself it ain't that funny.

~Mitch

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels of Mass Production turning; truth & beauty can't.

But actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with over-compensations for misery. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune... Happiness is never grand.


~Aldous Huxley

What great artist, what great musician, after becoming comfortable and secure and happy, did not start sucking in direct proportion? (exhibit A: Peter Gabriel)

The artists that remain great are finally consumed in the fire of their torment.

Here's a great quote from William Gerhardie:

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The art of living is the ability to subordinate minor motives to major ones. And it's an unsatisfactory art.

You must make up your mind what you want, and when you have made up your mind what you want, you might as well -- for all the difference it makes to you -- have never had a mind to make up. For consequences have a way of getting out of hand and laying out the motives indiscriminately.

And then *you* with your intent and will seem rather "in the way."

And that is the truth.
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Rings absolutely true... but I think only in terms of the most popular style of Living, or facet of Living: that having to do with accomplishment, security, survival, accumulation of wealth and achievement... He did come of age in Bourgeois Czarist Russia, which would focus him on a particular type of Life Art.

As opposed to the popular and momentarily funner beer-drinkin, job-losing, bail-posting approach.