Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.