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.

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

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

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.