Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done 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.

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.