Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.

Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.

as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again.

When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.