I thought... their elegance... lies not so much in their clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta.

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.