To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

Fraud makes the world go round.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.