It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.