Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.