Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

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

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.