What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these "digital products," the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune.