And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day.

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

The important thing is the educational experience itself — how to survive it.