The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.