A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.
Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.
Anywhere, anytime, I’d sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.
In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.
Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.
The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.
Henry James was our master of periphrasis – the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.
There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.
Books are like eggs – best when fresh.
One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it’s the right word.
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati – those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political – especially that which pretends not to be.