That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

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

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

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.

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