I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.