I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.

If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.