There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.