Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
The ordinary is the divine.
There’s a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one’s psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it – so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
It is useless either to hate or to love truth – but it should be noticed.
Time heals all things but one: Time.
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
He who cries, ‘What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,’ does not know even that.
Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.
All politicians know that every ‘temporary’ political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.
I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.
Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers – and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.
It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.