The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.