He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.