I Have An Instinct For Survival, For

Nature Is So Exact, It Hurts Exactly As Much As It Is Worth, So In A Way One Relishes The Pain. If It Didn't Matter, It Wouldn't Matter.

In My Terms, I Settled For The Realities Of Life, And Submitted To Its Necessities: If This, Then That, And So The Years Passed. In Adrian's Terms, I Gave Up On Life, Gave Up On Examining It, Took It As It Came. And So, For The First Time, I Began To Feel A More General Remorse - A Feeling Somewhere Between Self-pity And Self-hatred - About My Whole Life. All Of It. I Had Lost The Friends Of My Youth. I Had Lost The Love Of My Wife. I Had Abandoned The Ambitions I Had Entertained. I Had Wanted Life Not To Bother Me Too Much, And Had Succeeded - And How Pitiful That Was.

If The Writer Were More Like A Reader, He’d Be A Reader, Not A Writer. It’s As Uncomplicated As That.

His Air Of Failure Had Nothing Desperate About It; Rather, It Seemed To Stem From An Unresented Realisation That He Was Not Cut Out For Success, And His Duty Was Therefore To Ensure Only That He Failed In The Correct And Acceptable Fashion.

Everything In Art Depends On Execution: The Story Of A Louse Can Be As Beautiful As The Story Of Alexander. You Must Write According To Your Feelings, Be Sure Those Feelings Are True, And Let Everything Else Go Hang. When A Line Is Good It Ceases To Belong To Any School. A Line Of Prose Must Be As Immutable As A Line Of Poetry.