Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

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 wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?