The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?

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 trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.