A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes ….

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated ….

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated..

Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coachin….

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the….

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him..

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of exp….

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only m….

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and a….

Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist..

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion..

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes..

I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so f….

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations..

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people..

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity..

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story..

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story..

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene..

Self knowledge is always bad news..

Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn..