If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

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.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.