If You Would Learn A Thing, Straightway

The First Obligation Of The Writer Is To Be Interesting. To Be Interesting; Not To Change The World.

To Turn Experience Into Speech - That Is, To Classify, To Categorize, To Conceptualize, To Grammarize, To Syntactify It - Is Always A Betrayal Of Experience, A Falsification Of It; But Only So Betrayed Can It Be Dealt With At All, And Only In So Dealing With It Did I Ever Feel A Man, Alive And Kicking.

You Don't Reach Serendib By Plotting A Course For It. You Have To Set Out In Good Faith For Elsewhere And Lose Your Bearings... Serendipitously.

In Art As In Lovemaking, Heartfelt Ineptitude Has Its Appeal And So Does Heartless Skill, But What You Want Is Passionate Virtuosity.

The Genie Declared That In His Time And Place There Were Scientists Of The Passions Who Maintained That Language Itself, On The One Hand, Originated In 'infantile Pregenital Erotic Exuberance, Polymorphously Perverse,' And That Conscious Attention, On The Other, Was A 'libidinal Hypercathexis' - By Which Magic Phrases They Seemed To Mean That Writing And Reading, Or Telling And Listening, Were Literally Ways Of Making Love.