I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers

Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.