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

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.