“He says unloved women have no biographies—they have histories.”

“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”

“There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.”

“Biography is the falsest of the arts.”

“Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.”

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

“If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”