Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.