Go back to bed', said the omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at three o'clock in the morning on the Thursday in November. 'Go back to bed', because I love you. 'Go back to bed', beacause the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.