“Be true to your Dick.”

“Leave your incidental Dick.”

“I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me.”

“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.”

“do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation”

“Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams.”

“Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.”