We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.