“The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I'm allowed.”
“...like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it,...”
“The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.”
“I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.”
“My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.”
“I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.”