We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
Women, fire in their crotch, won’t burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots – places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.