Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. - John Updike

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say — ‘One world at a time’?