He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.