“I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

“Vanish.Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.Go back into the blue.I myself placed her ashes in the wall.I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.I know what it is I am now experiencing.I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.You may see nothing still to be lost.Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

“The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“I promised myself that I would maintain momentum."Maintain momentum" was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.In fact I had no idea what it was.”

“In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did.A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems.”

“All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.Which was a writer.By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?”