And never, ever, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy -yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.