“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

“Love is like Atlantis, OK? And I’m just a humble scuba diver searching for treasure that I can exchange for sexual favors.”

“I explore my subconscious the way Cousteau explored the sea: with a scuba tank and a smile.”

“Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.”

“In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.”

“There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”