“When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.”

“Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated”

“I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.”

“Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.”

“Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.”

“But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief--I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of imagination.”

“An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.”