For it must be very lonely being dead.

He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.

Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.