Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

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

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

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.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.