“They sat behind a screen, and grunted and wheezed over sheets of brown paper that looked as if ink-dipped and intoxicated spiders had danced across them.”

“I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.”

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

“Once, lovers on faraway shores sat by candlelight and dipped ink to parchment, writing words that could not be erased. They took an evening to compose their thoughts, maybe the next evening as well.”

“Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.”

“Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.”