I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bare ass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!

Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.

A suicide kills two people, that's what it's for!