Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

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

To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.