“Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.”

“The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.”

“I've been popular and unpopular successful and unsuccessful loved and loathed and I know how meaningless it all is. Therefore I feel free to take whatever risks I want.”

“Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance—half a fiction—in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another “character” added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn’t so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with “reason.”

“we are affirming our trust that creation means well within us all, and that whatever painful growth and change may lie ahead, it is leading us to Life, not destruction”

“The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.”