The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?

The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.