I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.