A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.
A writer’s self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.
Don’t you see, if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.
Love makes the air light.
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
Women are an alien race set down among us.
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.