"None but himself can be his parallel."

"No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness."

"It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself."

"That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw."

"The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear—that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write …"