The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.