The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.

Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?