Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

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

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.