The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend one human soul whom we can trust utterly who knows the best and worst of us and who loves us in spite of all our faults.

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

And then when all around grows dark when we feel utterly alone when all men right and left pass us by and know us not a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood all the work into middle age and all the regrets into old age.