We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

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.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.