“And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life-- and the friends who are about me whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence.”

“And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap.”

“I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine... gentle yet corageous, possesed, as a cultivated as well as a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own to aprove or amend my plans.”

“My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.”

“In my view, fate is like intelligence, or beauty, or type z + lymphocytes - some individuals have a greater supply than others. I, for one, suffer from a deficiency; I am a clerk in a bookstore whose life is devoid of complications or a storyline of its own. My life is governed by the attraction of books. The weak magnetic field of my fate is distorted by those thousands of fates more powerful and more interesting than my own.”

“My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.”