"What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness."

"Writing is prayer."

"But sleep? On a night like this? What an idea! Just think of how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm."

"I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it."

"Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night."

"He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone."

"What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself."

"I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."

"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."

"On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter."

"Your library is your paradise."

"I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy."

"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror."

"My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me."

"That what appears to be egoism so often isn't."

"-the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer."

"Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you."

"The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages."

"She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself."

"She committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm."

"This is water."

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."

"Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it."

"I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN."