Life owes me a living worth living. Yes, Eden regarded life as her debtor, she its relentless paymaster.

Nervous hands as if the fingers were dripping from them like icicles.

Any work of art ... is great when it makes you feel that its creator has dipped into your very heart for his sensation.

Some authors have what amounts to a metaphysical approach. They admit to inspiration. Sudden and unaccountable urgencies to writecatapult them out of sleep and bed. For myself, I have never awakened to jot down an idea that was acceptable the following morning.

But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

Charm is an odorless perfume, which cannot be anchored in the chemists' test tube. It is a permeation, a radiation. It emanates from the climate of a warm human spirit, which not only contains light, but gives it off.

we dig our graves with our teeth.