Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.