It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.