Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

Death persecutes before it executes.

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

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