The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

You’re one tough egg to crack. You know that? You’re like a Kinder egg wrapped inside a mystery wrapped inside an enigma.

I write my own songs, and I only see their flaws.

A brave man scorns to quarrel once a day; Like Hectors in at every petty fray.

No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.

So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change - as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don't stagnate.

Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within.

If we are given a chance to go back to our youth, we won't go back, because we cannot give up our accumulated wisdom and we cannot give up things that belong to our time!

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

COUGHS. These are symptoms, not diseases. Take them to your doctor and he can give you something serious to worry about.

Six-year-olds are very wrapped up in their own lives, and that's the way it should be.