Language is memory and metaphor.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

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.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.