Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.