One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Facts are lonely things.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.