What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
Death persecutes before it executes.
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
What we think we are surely going to do, we don’t do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.
The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.
Old saws have no teeth.
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it...
Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.