One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.

Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.

I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.

Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.