Writing is both mask and unveiling.

I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.

A writer's style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias...it is the Self escaping into the open.

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.