He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.