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.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

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

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

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.

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.