An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.

Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat.

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.

There are many people like me who believe firmly, if somewhat incoherently, that pockets on this planet are filled with what humans have left behind them, both good and evil, and that any such spiritual accumulation can stay there forever, past definition of such a stern word.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.