Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.