An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

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