Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

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

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.