But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear.

You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.