“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”

“The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”

“we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death”

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.”

“Look, writers aren't perfect, I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be.”

“If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.”

“The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?”