"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while …"

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature…"

"I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. C…"

"When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life…"

"It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work."

"My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to …"

"RIDING DOWN TO Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the t…"

"Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of w…"

"“Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in …"

"Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word — life. Certai…"