In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
The imagination has resources and intimations we don’t even know about.
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk – a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Life is that which – pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially – interrupts.
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.
In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
I think about fanaticism – oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Dedication to one’s work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else’s work, not yours.
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail’s secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.
Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.
Time at length becomes justice.
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.