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.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.

The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

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.