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.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?