Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated..

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words..

Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one i….

So if hunger provokes wailing and wailing brings the breast; if the breast permits sucking and milk suggests its swallow; if swallowing issues in sle….

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

As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, ….

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard..

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things..

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is….

The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrational….

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 t….

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] br….

How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one….

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them….

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongue….

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer..

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books..

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily..

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone ….

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