My ignorance is not charming.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -