It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.