By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .

Dear Jesus, do something.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.