“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”

“Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.”

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. ”

“It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.”

“Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.”

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”