“We cannot escape the longing, no matter what life we choose. Were either longing for people, places or times gone by, which are essentially the same things: memories. And, whether or not we travel,...”

“Literature is the product of a deep-seated need for honesty. Hence, those who lie most are struck most deeply by it, and those who are honest have no need for it.”

“Writers are liars trying to come clean. Thats why the best ones are the most tragic.”

“Reflection is nothing more than what it sounds, and pondering ones own life is about as productive as talking to ones image in a mirror: both acts are egocentric and neither produces a dialog. Peop...”

“If one chews a problem over long enough, it becomes apparent that the jaw is aching, and what started as weighing heavy on the heart ends up a pain in the neck.”

“Physiologically, the union of two opposites is a pleasurable affair. Why should the psyche be any different?”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great...”

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cove...”

“What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.”

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”

“There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in ord...”

“Unlike written words which can mend those leaving the tip of your tongue never bend.”

“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are...”

“Writing is a mysterious activity.”