There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

And never forget, there is memory.