What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.