Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring...

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It’s technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day–a way of relating.

So you don’t believe we have souls I guess?” and Legs laughed and said, “Yeah probably we do but why’s that mean we’re gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn’t it, while...

One man’s insanity is another man’s genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

Can compromise be an art? Yes–but a minor art.

The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being – her ‘visibility’ – figures so prominently in...

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Living’s immediacy, you go full sail, you’re in a fever of motion. Until it’s safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, “Yes I was happy then,...

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the...

You people who have survived childhood don’t remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be...

I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo...

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no ‘morality’. For what’s ‘morality’ but a leash around the neck? A noose? What’s ‘morality’ but what other people want you to...

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl....

I’m sure all that you’ve heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

The distinction between “assistant” and intern” is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed – neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica,...

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don’t...

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or ‘fearlessly’- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though...

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in...

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.

My dis-interest in what people speak of as “women’s problems,” “women’s literature.” Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but...

culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that...

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and...

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.

Hating “The Great Gatsby” (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke...