Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

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.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.