You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.

Civilization begins with distillation