The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

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

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body.

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