I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the first time. It was still an adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening.

It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.