“It’s an egotistical self-assertion, if you like—the mere act of writing a book is that.”

“The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn’t like to be brutally or coarsely wooed.”

“You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it.”

“If other writers can spend ten pages on the act of fellatio without embarrassing themselves, very good luck to them.”

“Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.”

“Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. I don’t think there’s any consecutive moral philosophy in fiction beyond excellence.”

“One of the difficulties in writing poetry is to maintain your sense of excitement and discovery about what you write.”

“I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities. Unless you’re Henry James.”

“So I knew I had to write a book that would be the best work in the world. It was that simple.”

“I’ve often worried about this—that if one got really very happy in life, one might not want to write at all.”

“We all die, yes? We suffer, correct? The score keeps changing, is it not so? And Mommy holds us on the teeter-totter before we can sit upright on chairs.”

“The premise of moral art is that life is better than death; art hunts for avenues to life.”

“Getting even is one great reason for writing.”

“It is enraging to work in words, sometimes; no wonder writers are often nervous and crazy"

“I don’t have that narcissistic drive, the megalomania involved in spending years working on a book that no one is really interested in publishing.”

“The burden of living one’s own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share."

“I love works written in passion by great writers even when they’re a bit silly.”

“[Nabokov’s] language is made visible . . . like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.”

“It’s a natural activity, you see, writing. More people do it than will admit to it…”

“The subject of art is life. You learn life by living it. And you don’t live it alone—even on Walden Pond—as Walden proves on every page.”

“Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.”

“My house has been burned; I have been detained more than once; I have been exiled; they have declared me incommunicado . . . Very well then. I'm not comfortable with what I have.”

“I have beliefs, of course, like everyone—but I don’t always believe in them.” 

“I've been very lucky, very lucky. I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.”

“An awful lot of bad writing is due to people trying to write like great writers and not really seeing that the outer covering has nothing to do with it at all.”

“It seems as if I was fated to write… which is horrible.”

“In English the expression ‘ancient Greece’ includes the meaning of ‘finished,’ whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet.”

“The most brilliant example [of good editing] in our time
. . . was Ezra Pound’s editing of The Waste Land, which made the poem infinitely better.”

“A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.”

“First coffee. Then a bowel movement. Then the muse joins me.”

"Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."

“Once you're into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.”

“I go to sleep reading and I wake up reading. Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I’ve been looking for all my life.”

“If a poet is really good he can give you a moment of reconcilement to the tragic nature of things.”

“One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation.”

"Those rather hit-or-miss days have passed away. But thank God, that doesn’t seem to matter!"

"Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure almost anything as long as you can sing about it."

“At the age of eighteen all young poets are sure they will be dead at twenty-one—of old age.”