He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

Write what you love and love what you write.

We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.