it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

He who searches for evil, must first look at his own reflection.

The long years had taught him that everything worked itself out given enough time, and some things would always be the way fate wished them to be.

I look at life as an adventure. Each new chapter brings new opportunities.

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth__ ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.