You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.

Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else.

It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.