She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.

We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.