Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.
Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.
I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn’t matter.
The imagination has resources and intimations we don’t even know about.
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk – a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Life is that which – pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially – interrupts.
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.
In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
I think about fanaticism – oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Dedication to one’s work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else’s work, not yours.
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail’s secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.