This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.