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

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

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

a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

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

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.

What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.