How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.

They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

I went to high school in Indianapolis I learned how to walk around looking tough because everybody had to do that. I go out there occasionally and they're still doing it, walking around looking very tough because something might happen.

There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.