“Our relationship is like ten turtles marching along, followed by seven beetles, with each carrying one monosyllabic word on its back. You might call that a haiku, but I call it love.”

“Someday I want to write a sixteen-syllable Haiku about the death and disappearance of a monosyllabic word.”

“Love is not like choosing a partner for whist. It has a life of its own. our duty is merely to follow its call.”

“I would hate to see seventeen people with monosyllabic names like Mike or Ann die, but if they did, and you wrote down all their names in groups of 5-7-5, you'd have one tragic haiku.”

“...there's one thing you'll never be delivered from. It's a ten-letter word called temptation!”

“Let’s listen again to Dencombe: 'Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.' I love the fact that he uses the word 'passion' and the word 'task' in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace. More than this, I love that he equates them. Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-to-earth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence. Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion.Whatever you decide to call it, the ability to consecrate yourself to the daily task of art isn’t rooted in madness. As James knew, as Dencombe knew, it’s rooted in sanity.”