It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance..

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it..

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader..

We still and always want waking..

The irrational haunts the metaphysical..

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles..

To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till t….

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark..

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind..

The surest sign of age is loneliness..

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the s….

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more..

A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much r….

Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discove….

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting..

The interior life is often stupid..

Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can t….

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not was….

I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only lov….

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere..