My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

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

The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.