If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!

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.

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

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.