The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.