The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It's so wonderful, going to bed.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.