Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking — by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

Love is a negative form of hatred.

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?" "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.