I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

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

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

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.