I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.

I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I appeared to them.

Afterlife, in my mind, is pretty much nothing. This is it. This is what we get, for me.

Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.