A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.