Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular.
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction
. . . it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty.
Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
An American presidential campaign resembles a forced march through enemy country.
We have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know.