It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

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

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

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

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.

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.