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

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

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.

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

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

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.