“If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.”

“Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.”

“Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?”

“A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powd...”

“The novella will be called, I think, The Messiah of Stockholm. It takes place in Stockholm. Id better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.”

“Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“The best incentive for an artist are the harshest criticism”

“I have no idea how to be an artist and a lover, so I chose the one most likely to make me happy when I'm eighty and gazing back on a long and productive life.”

“Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.”

“Universe is nothing, but human thought.”

“Nothing is the whole story. The selfs curse and the writers.”

“There's a fine line, you know. Between having space and having nothing.”