I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.