You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?