“I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.”
Sad feeling
Sad Quotes — page 262 of 475
“What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.”
“Oh, I haven't reached any peak. I hit the bottom in the '60s. When a certain actress undertook the leading role in a recent play of mine, she referred to me as "that old derelict." Not to my face, but behind my back.”
“I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.”
“It is observed of gold, by an old epigrammatist, that to have it is to be in fear, and to want it is to be in sorrow.”
“The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.”
“We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.”
“I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.”
“There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it.”
“Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt; that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls.”
“Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.”
“Avarice is always poor.”
“Ah! Sir, a boy's being flogged is not so severe as a man's having the hiss of the world against him.”
“Misery is caused for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, which canker enjoyment, and undermine security. The visit of an invader is necessarily rare, but domestic animosities allow no cessation.”
“A man guilty of poverty easily believes himself suspected.”
“All this [wealth] excludes but one evil, poverty.”
“In elite, primarily white institutions, there are many blacks who have white wives. So much so that sometimes there is almost the assumption that I would be married to a white woman.”
“Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.”
“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”
“All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel - or if there was, it was an oncoming train.”