What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?