No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before.

But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.

In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented in books. [] there simmered all the feelings no one ever admits to.

... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.