I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

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.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.