Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.