"I could only write at the beach, and I kept getting sand in my typewriter."

"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."

"Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don't like society — much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the a…"

"The Empty Quarter offered me the chance to win distinction as a traveller; but I believed that it could give me more than this, that in those empty wastes I could find the peace that comes with solitu…"