Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

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.)

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

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.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.