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.

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

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

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

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

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.