The images of things are not the things in themselves.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

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.