An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.