My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.

It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.