An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.

The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.

I have no wisdom and nothing useful to tell you - I only mentioned this because it came into my head.

Them as counts counts moren them as dont count

But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. . . Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.

The first thing I would say to young writers is, "Don't do it, unless you can't stand not to do it." And the second thing I would say is, "If you do do it, and get into it, the constant rule you should have in mind is to explore your material." It sounds simple, but it isn't, because people often want to get from A to B, and they don't stop to look at what is in the material.