literature is the last banquet between minds.

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

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.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.