The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.