God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.