A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

You see in others who you are.

We didn't starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.