All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.