Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

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.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.