The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.