I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.