Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

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.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.