How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

But the body fails us and the mirror knows, and we no longer insist that the gray hush be carried off its surface by the cloth, for we have run to fat, and wrinkles encircle the eyes and notch the neck where the skin wattles, and the flesh of the arms hangs loose like an overlarge sleeve, veins thicken like ropes and empurple the body as though they had been drawn there by a pen, freckles darken, liver spots appear, the hairah, the hair is exhausted and gray and lusterless, in weary rolls like cornered lint.