Mere Fact Has No Chance Of Being

Novelists Tend To Go Off At 70, And I'm In A Funk About It, I've Got Myself Into A Real Paranoid Funk About It, How The Talent Dies Before The Body.

Screw-top Wine Has Improved The Quality Of Life By About Ten Percent, Wouldn't You Say?

It's Not That You Get A Cliché And Then Wiggle It About Or Use Synonyms. You Don't Take An Ordinary Decorative Paragraph And Give It Style. What You're Trying To Do Is Be Faithful To Your Perceptions And Transmit Them As Faithfully As You Can. I Say These Sentences Until They Sound Right. There's No Objective Reason Why They're Right. They Just Sound Right To Me.

On Any Longer View, Man Is Only Fitfully Committed To The Rational -- To Thinking, Seeing, Learning, Knowing. Believing Is What He's Really Proud Of.

When Things Are Going Well, You Do Have The Sense That What You’re Writing Is Being Fed To You In Some Way. Auden Compared Writing A Poem To Cleaning An Old Piece Of Slate Until The Letters Appear. The Only Way You Could Reveal Your God Is Perhaps Under Hypnosis. It’s Sacred And It’s Secret, Even To The Writer.