The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.