If you believed yourself to be a writer of eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill-not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.

And the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.

Books didn't figure in my family very much. . . . However, my grandmother's attic was full of old, old books . . . In the summers we would go to North Dakota to visit her, and I would get in that attic and read everything in sight. That's when the passion started. I was maybe eight or nine.

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

We have scarcely gotten home . . . when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so.

Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.

As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them