“Not to me," I said.Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote TheCharterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on MadameBovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man WithoutQualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about anyof that now?”

“Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.”

“Do you know what happened the last time a nation listened to a bush?" Honey asks. No one says a word. "Its people wandered in the desert for forty years.”

“when a man's only assets are the brain in his head and thetongue in his mouth, he has to think carefully before he decidesto open that mouth and speak.”

“Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.”

“The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.”

“That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into thebargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It hadnever felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of strugglingto write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that hedidn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, hecouldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing itanymore.”