All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.

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

I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.