No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I decline to accept the end of man.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.