If I Had A Camera,'

I Used To Think That If I Had A Choice Between Writing Well And Living Well, I Would Choose The Former. But Now I Think That's Sheer Lunacy. Writing Weighs So Much Less, In The Great Cosmic Equation, Than Living.

When The Word 'nostalgia' Was Coined In The 18th Century, It Was Used To Describe A Pathology - Not So Much A Sense Of Lost Time, But A Severe Homesickness.

Sometimes Just To Paint A Head You Have To Give Up The Whole Figure. To Paint A Leaf, You Have To Sacrifice The Whole Landscape. It Might Seem Like You're Limiting Yourself At First, But After A While You Realize That Having A Quarter Of An Inch Of Something You Have A Better Chance Of Holding On To A Certain Feeling Of The Universe Than If You Pretended To Be Doing The Whole Sky.

He Spoke Of Human Solitude, About The Intrinsic Loneliness Of A Sophisticated Mind, One That Is Capable Of Reason And Poetry But Which Grasps At Straws When It Comes To Understanding Another, A Mind Aware Of The Impossibility Of Absolute Understanding. The Difficulty Of Having A Mind That Understands That It Will Always Be Misunderstood.

Only Now That My Son Was Gone Did I Realize How Much I'd Been Living For Him. When I Woke Up In The Morning It Was Because He Existed, And When I Ordered Food It Was Because He Existed, And When I Wrote My Book It Was Because He Existed To Read It.