Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

... silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.