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.

not every boy thrown to the wolves becomes a hero.

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

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

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.

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.