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.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

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.