Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.