I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.

I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us.

Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.

The earth here is beautiful. And it still belongs to the dead.