The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.