To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.