Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races. Farewell.

In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.

Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect...

A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer.

Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.

Writing is not “the establishment of a professional reputation” as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel – and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.