Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.