What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.