Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

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

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.