Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

In a family, the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

The novel is rescued life.

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.