Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.

What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.

Joy and sadness come by turns.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.