The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.