“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”

“after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.”

“The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...”

“What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.”

“Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.”

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

“Any concentration of the will displaces life and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.”