Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

[after pulling his car up onto the sidewalk]Is this not a reasonable place to park?

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that's all I need. I'm perfectly lonely.

He sought the neighborhoods out rather than waiting for them. He was very shrewd.