The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility,...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks,...

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

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...

And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha—none of the...

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

Wills aren’t really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are.

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something...

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;...

Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their...

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night…

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier...

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep....

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like...

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you...

…until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum — a room in a dream.

…reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers…annotations, arrows…an oudine of its design…very seriously mislead.

Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening—here Orcutt chuckled—it’s a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can’t remember.

When book and reader’s furrowed brow meet, it isn’t always the book that’s stupid.

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction’s fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can’t afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the...