Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.