You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.