I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.