Activity

5/26/54

Alcoholism for the writer: He carries around his wonderful gift. It is the only sure thing, and it is stronger than any bank. He can sit down any time, and with a modicum of peace of mind, write more beautifully than 999,999,999 people out of 1,000,000,000. So he drinks away the afternoo…

9/28/53

[Allela] Cornell—Why does the artist commit suicide? Because he sees and longs for more intensely than other people what he cannot have—the happy home, the children, the piano, the sunlight on the lawn, the years of satisfying work ahead, each year like the other. The artist cannot make …

9/3/53

An artist will always drink, even when he is happy (that is when he is working well and with a woman he loves) because he will always think of the woman he saw last week, or the woman who is a hundred or three thousand miles away, with whom he might have been happier, or just as happy. If…

8/18/53

It is curious that in the most interesting periods of one’s life, one never writes one’s diary. There are some things that even a writer cannot put down in words (at the time). He shrinks from putting them down. And what a loss! Like a lot of outrageous, apparently senseless losses in na…

10/28/52

The really depressing thing about being depressed is that one’s own thoughts and their obvious courses (into all the little cul-de-sacs of impossibility) are so ordinary. To a much stupider man than myself, the same thoughts would occur, one realizes. And worst of all, the same emotions…