Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

A few places are especially conducive to inspiration - automobiles, church - public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church - little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday.

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.