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

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

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

I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

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.