Death persecutes before it executes.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

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