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.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

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.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

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

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