It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness..

Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!.

If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with….

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man..

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and de….

When the State withers, humanity flowers..

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van..

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act ….

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual..

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked of….

Life is, of course, terrible..

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth..

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: ….

I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong..

The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling thr….

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it..

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace..

Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned..

...youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys y….

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed….

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create..