Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.