Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others..

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down..

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction..

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water..

I like to see life with its teeth out..

From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truth….

The sun is all love and murder, judgement, the perpetual raid of conscience, paratrooping light which opens like a snow-blossom in the downward drift….

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for….

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of drea….

Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day..

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the s….

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it..

The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (t….

Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X….

time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated with the host resembling the character in the fairytale who was joined along the route by more and….

It is always hard to believe that the will to change something does not produce an immediate change..

Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sun….

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter..

All writers - all beings - are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries ….

Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could not choos….

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individua….