Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.

To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive...but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life of its own.

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.

The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.

After fifty, one ceases to digest. As someone once said, "I just ferment my food now."

At my public school I had hated every other face for fear the owner was a lord, at university, I was to court the rich while doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes.

I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow.