Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.

I will never lie again.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.