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.

perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

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.

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

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.