Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Nathanael West
Nathanael West Quotes
19 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
On the Hollywood studio system:
A sargasso of the imagination!
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice? — Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
No dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Betty took him for a walk in the zoo and he was amused by her evident belief in the curative power of animals. She seemed to think that it must steady him to look at a buffalo.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one—like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail—making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of twentieth-century America.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can't help crying.
Nathanael West
Source
Report...
He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.
Nathanael West
Quote of the day
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
Nathanael West
Born:
October 17, 1903
Died:
December 22, 1940
(aged 37)
Bio:
Nathanael West was an American author, screenwriter and satirist.
Known for:
The Day of the Locust (1939)
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931)
Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust
Most used words:
man
literature
art
Nathanael West on Wikipedia
Nathanael West works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
American Novelist Quotes
Novelist Quotes
20th-century Novelist Quotes
Related Authors
Raymond Chandler
American Screenwriter
Burgess Meredith
American Actor
Maureen Stapleton
American Actress
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes