1. “Literature is for the sake of humanity.”
2. “Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.”
3. “The engineering is secondary to the vision.”
4. “Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.”
5. “Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.”
6. “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”
7. “If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
8. “Time at length becomes justice.”
9. “What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”
10. “To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.”
11. “Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.”
12. “After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.”
13. “To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.”
14. “The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kid of power a writer is entitled to.”
15. “Death persecutes before it executes.”
16. “Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.”
17. “Paradise is only for those who have already been there.”
18. “All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.”
19. “Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.”
20. “The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.”
21. “In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.”
22. “Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.”
23. “One reason writers write is out of revenge.”
24. “It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.”
25. “Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.”
26. “The imagination has resources intimations we don’t even know about.”
27. “Advances in technology neither impede or augment literature”
28. “It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.”
29. “To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.”
30. “The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.”
