Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.

not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

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

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?