“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.”

“How do you write about something, even something real and painful-like suicide-when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?”

“Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book.”

“Any artist who has ever created something worthwhile has done so by staying true to himself. You can't do it any other way.”

“I'm pretty good at inventing phrases- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too...I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read them and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?”

“When you can bring yourself to write about it one day, you will find it all less painful. It is a catharsis of sorts, but the process can be brutal. Don’t do it until you’re ready.”