A good writer always works at the impossible.

Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.