“Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.”

“In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.”

“Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.”

“Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.”

“It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.”

“Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”

“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...”