The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.