I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

If I can stop one heart from breaking I shall not live in vain If I can ease one life the aching Or cool one pain Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again I shall not live in vain.

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.

There are plenty of cases of war being begun before it is declared.

Something special is ending, and you're sad, but you can't be that said because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there'll be other vacations, other good times.

Sometimes love can be so wrong/Like a fat man in a thong.

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.

A great many people fall in love with or feel attracted to a person who offers the least possibility of a harmonious union.

Whatever prepares you for death enhances life.