If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.

Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.

We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!