Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.