The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.