Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.