Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?