The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.