I don’t care if the streets of Heaven are gold or not as long as they’re clean and I don’t have to sweep them.

This is not to say a writer has only one voice or is limited to the scope of her backyard. But in some sense her work must begin there, at the rootwad. And wherever she travels she must take that place with her, must feel in the dark of memory for its shape.

The decrees of society are temporary ones; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality.

A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?

The need for Mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves.