“A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.”

“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”

“On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.”

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.”

“So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.”

“Naturally society cherished itself alone; it prized what everyone agreed was precious, despised what everyone agreed was despicable, and ignored what no one mentioned-all to it's own enhancement, and with the loud view that these bubbles and vapors were eternal and universal. If June had stressed to Mabel that she was going to die, would she have learned to eat with a fork? Society's loyal members, having sacrificed their only lives to it's caprices, hastened to entrap the next generation into agreement, so their follies would not have been in vain and they could all go down together, blind and well turned out. The company, the club, and the party had offered him a position like bait, and he bit. He had embedded himself in the company like a man bricked into a wall, and whirled with the building's maps, files, and desks,senselessly, as the planet spun and death pooled on the cold basement floors. Who could blame him?- when people have always lived so. Now , however, he saw the city lifted away, and the bricks and files vaporized; he saw the preenings of men laid low, and the comforts of family scattered. He was free and loosed on the black beach.”