“Where are your books? - that light bequeathedTo beings else forlorn and blind!Up! up! and drink the spirit breathedFrom dead men to their kind.”

“I spent so much of my younger life drinking, and being drunk makes learning to be a grown-up kind of hard.”

“A kindly tongue is the lodestone of the hearts of men. It is the bread of the spirit, it clotheth the words with meaning, it is the fountain of the light of wisdom and understanding.”

“Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.”

“...and she's thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.”

“opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit, thoughts, fears, future, hopes, dreams ... that is being naked.”