Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

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.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.