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

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

Writing is only a guided dream.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.