Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly