“[John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing.... No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his clockworks, his verbal descriptions failed to shine with the same light.... The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually unpunctuated, for twenty-five pages." Dava Sobel, Longitude, p66”

“The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.”

“After those four years, he returned to the Midwest. He'd turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and ever sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him.”

“If he lacks verbal expression of it, you may find his love profoundly in his works, deeds and creativity; so recognize rather than criticize.”

“The God of revealed religions - and by this I mean religions like yours - is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can't make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews, but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can't seem to do any better.”

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”