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

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

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

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

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