“I would tell you the safe procedure to avoid lightning strikes while on an exposed ridge, but I see no reason you should not learn it as I did. If you get tweaked by God's long electric fingers, I can hardly be to blame. You are a fat-assed nerd anyway, without a pistol within reach and incapable of running more than three miles without the last rites. You, fart-brain, are a reader, and the only thing I despise more is a writer, who simply ought to announce himself a public masturbator and be done with it. But I am telling my story, you are listening, and so we have a truce, if not respect. I am a writer, you a reader, and if there were a God, he might be amused to have mercy on our souls. Or piss on them. In long electric streaks.”

“A writer edits his thoughts more thoroughly the more readers he has. You can tell I only have two readers, myself included.”

“As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime,” he said. “I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.”

“A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?”

“But God, I don’t doubt You. I can see You in the morning, in the dew on the grass. Should I worship You in silence, without the obeisance and obedience to Your ministers? Should I stop singing and, within me, let my deeds speak of my belief and gratitude in Your greatness?The men who taught us of Your presence, who opened the doors of Your temple that I may see the light – they are white like You. Are You then the god of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive Your blessings as white men do?I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white.I should worship then not a white god but someone brown like me. Pride tells me only one thing – that we are more than equal with those who rule us. Pride tells me that this land is mine, that they should leave me to my destiny, and if they will not leave, pride tells me that I should push them away and should they refuse this, I should vanquish them, kill them. I have known long ago that their blood is the same as mine. No stranger can come battering down my door and say he brings me light. This I have within me.”

“If you honestly feel you have done something so terrible that you cannot be forgiven, then I am willing to share your sins with you. When we die, if we should have to stand before God and be judged, then I will tell him I am as much to blame as you and that half your punishment should be portioned out to me.”