Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.