In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.