Jay Robinson

But maybe going through that kind of tough, lonely experience is necessary when you’re young. Part of the process of growing up. The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grow stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter.

Have faith that the writing process is where you learn rather than where you prove what you already know.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

It was on this day, during this terrible and wonderful run, that a thought occurred to me, a thought which has never left me: I’ve always considered _the_ question to be ‘Why am I alive? Why am I here? What’s the point of _me_?’ And to that I say: Who cares! Forget the why...

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He felt deeply that California was the only place he could live. It’s the slanting evening light on the hills, the palette, the fundamental beauty. In his very soul, Steve was a Californian. He required the liberty it afforded, the clean slate. He worked under the influence, and the inspiration, of the sublimity of the place. He needed to be refreshed by the primal rhythms of the natural world—the land, the hills, the oaks, the orchards. California’s spirit of newness invigorated him, and ratified his own spirit. Its scale is contagious: such natural grandeur is the perfect setting for thinking big.

It speaks to some basic human needs, that there is a tomorrow—it’s not all going to be over in a big flash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans. No ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids—human beings built them because they’re clever and they work hard. And _Star Trek_ is about those things.

We are not ruled by stars; we are composed of their matter. We're not steered by the movement of spheres; we are heavenly bodies projecting meaning into space and time. We're not fated by gods and sprites and stories penned by the ancients; we are love in human form writing life upon the land.

Concern for the soul is faulted for making us disregard the body, neglect our responsibilities to the Earth, and deny our kinship with other life forms. We share 90 percent of our genes with mice. Even the lowliest bacterium is our cousin. Why do we persist in imagining that there is some fifth essence in us that sets us apart?

You — as a human being — grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name ’em, I ate ’em.