It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of 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.

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

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

I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

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

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.