The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.