A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.