“I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”

“I began, I remember, because I felt I had to. I'd reached that modest height in my career, that gentle rise, from which I could coast out of gear to a soft stop. Now I wonder why not. Why not? But then duty drove me forward like a soldier. I said it was time for "the Big Book," the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to have: a pyramid, a column tall enough to satisfy the sky. Duty drove me the way it drives men into marriage. Begetting is expected of us, and in those days of heavy men in helmets the seed was certain, and wanted only the wind for a womb, or any slit; yet what sprang up out of those foxholes we fucked with our fists but our own frightened selves? with a shout of pure terror, too. That too—that too was expected; it was expected even of flabby maleless men like me. And now, here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving and unfeeling eye?...my eye. So sentences circle me like a toy train. What could I have said about the Boche, about bigotry, barbarism, butchery, Bach, that hasn't been said as repeatedly as I dreamed by dream of glory, unless it was what I've said? What could I have explained where no reason exists and no cause is adequate; what body burned to a crisp could I have rebelieved was bacon, if I had not taken the tack I took?”

“Honey, you are a baby in this world and don't know how to howl yet.”

“Is it really possible that the finest sensations in life are simple: the delicate brush of Lou’s hair across my chest, for instance? Yes. It is possible. Or was it the feeling I felt in each length as they drifted over me, the love I perceived in their gentle tickle? Yes. That was possible too. With Lou’s soft first kiss, wasn’t it mainly the miracle of its happening at all which made it so wondrous, so plainly impossible? And was I waiting on the stair for the world’s wind to do the same, to display for me that rare union of meaning, gesture, and understanding, which the artist gnaws up knuckles to achieve? O. Oooh…the decades I’ve done in and then abandoned without even waiting for the wounds to bleed!”

“time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.”

“We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, “Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books” (2006)”

“In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.”