Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.