No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

That complete statement which is literature.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

Thinking is my fighting.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.