The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?