Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

More from The Crack-Up, 'Notebook O' (ed. by Edmund Wilson, 1945)

• All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
• At the worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house.
• He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never again romp like the mind of God.
• She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
• Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.
• Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.