Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.