In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

Time at length becomes justice.

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.