Literature is for the sake of humanity.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

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.

People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

I work from a different theory. For everything there’s a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.

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.

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it – so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

Death’s reliable.

Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One’s own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth – but it should be noticed.