Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.