Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said. We're not opposites.' I don't mean just you and me. Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.

It seems to me that literature is giving way a little bit to the immediacy of other diversions, other forms of entertainment. What will it be in fifty years? I don't know. Will there be printed books? Probably, but I'm not sure. There's always going to be literature, though. I believe that. I think literature has a way of getting deep into people and being essential. Literature has its own powers.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.