Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

Language is memory and metaphor.

the sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels.

invaders always destroy libraries.

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.

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.