For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Are you living just a little and calling that life?

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

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.