It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.