“Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.”

“Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think. . . I know what I'm talking about.”

“I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.”

“Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.”

“In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”

“Nobody knew how to be what they were right. ”