Mason Cooley Quotes

Awakening in the morning returns us to life, and to awareness of death.

Life is what it makes you.

Life is the risk we cannot refuse.

Full of troubles, the mind is still the only Garden of Delight.

The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.

When my expectations are exactly fulfilled, I feel that something uncanny has happened.

I regret. I apologize. I blame myself. I continue as before.

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

Regret leads to overeating and naps.

Show enough regret, and your refusal will inspire gratitude.

I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

Reading more than life teaches us to recognize ethos and pathos.

Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.

The writer is always courted by invitations from the all-too- familiar.

The writer considers sayability before anything else.

I am most drawn to writing when I have something else urgent to do.

Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.

Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence.

The more learned a writer, the more digression beckons him.

The more knowledge, the clearer what the doubts are.

Now that I see you understand me so well, I will avoid you.

We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it.

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.

Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you.

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

Fearful of sentimentality, I disown my tears and melting heart.

If you insist on asking me why I feel the way I do, I plan to take the Fifth Amendment.

Under attack, sentiments harden into dogma.

The nonsense that charms is close to sense.

Sometimes I dread loneliness more than bores. Other times, the reverse.

Commitments, not feelings, hold life together.

When love ends, the beloved is no longer standing on a pedestal, but in a hole.

Money comes to life as it is spent.

I am only interested in money because everyone else is.

A budget takes the fun out of money.

An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult.

The Puritan sours his pleasures by disguising them as duties.

In describing someone's character, I reveal my own.

Reading gives you some place to go when you have to stay where you are.

Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book.

The prison is the state writ small.

The plastic surgeon's knife slashes at time, which may seem to retreat, but then keeps on coming.

The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.

Those who follow where their genitals lead them often wind up in tedious company.

Good books do not make people wiser or happier--only more conscious.

Reading civilized the inner life.

Many attempt to harvest what was never planted.

If the current is right, one can drift to success.