literary muse Quotes

No book of mine is complete without a dog.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator.

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.