“...How did this happen? It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know I'm drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive?”

“It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe ”

“How many times can a man go down and still be alive?”

“But I did not yet know, at that time, how tender the earth can be for those who have only her and how many graves in her giving, for the living."First Love”

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”

“People talk about how fast life can go from good to bad. How on day you're happy, everything is going fine, and then something happens. Someone dies or someone leaves. There's an illness or an accident. Life as you know it slips away. But it can got the other way too. You can go from god-awful to pretty OK in a single day. That's what happened to us, and it was just as jarring.”