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I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the beautiful. A broke-back sentence is interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, “It is not clear that...” is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind. A way of backing into a story—of getting past the reader’s hardwon armor.

I think that the effort is to reach a realm of meaning that is not quite sayable. You stay away from what can be said and you try to reach what can’t quite be said. Yet it is nevertheless meaningful. And there is such a realm and it is very difficult to talk about. It’s not quite nonverbal, but that comes fairly close.

In this century there’s been much stress placed not upon what we know but on knowing that our methods are themselves questionable—our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle.

It is well to be simple once in a while.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.

Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful. I agree that this is a highly specialized enterprise, akin to the manufacture of merkins, say—but it’s what I do. Probably I have missed the point of the literature business entirely.

Faust fulfills this idea. Anyone who has a notion of what it means for a person to live on spirit also knows what the hunger of doubt means and knows that the doubter hungers just as much for the daily bread of life as for the nourishment of spirit.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

The cells in your head are reading these words. Think how remarkable that is.

Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to.