“In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.”

“Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

“It was your idea. Only fair that if we get attacked, you should be first on their menu”

“Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger -- that would suffice for my eternity!”

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”

“Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.”