Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel every particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share."---Forward to Kafka's Short stories

As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.

I believe in the Biblical documents supporting Jesus. But I have no illusions about them. I think they contain many flaws, scribal errors, and so forth and they are only partial or fragmentary.

My life's been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I've done everything in the name of defiance.

I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I'm not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers