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.

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

Agony without genius was gaucherie.

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

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