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

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

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.

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.