“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”

“A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.”

“We’re here to send you back to Hell where you belong,” Tarren said, his eyes glinting dangerously. …Yeah, course he said that. Tarren is full of witty one-liners. He spends hours every night thinking them up and writing them down in his diary… No, I’ve seen it. It’s pink and got little flowers all over it. …Oh, now that’s just mean. Wait, you’re making me laugh, I gotta keep going…. The story. Stop interrupting. I’m losing my place.”

“A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an “idea” already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form.”

“you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”

“The books the Holy Spirit is writing are living, and every soul a volume in which the divine author makes a true revelation of his word, explaining it to every heart, unfolding it in every moment.”