The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.