If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing.

Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance.

When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them.