The role of art is to make a world which can be tolerated.

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

But the world was my home and I was glad to be in it.

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

Is the small town a place, truly, of the world, or is it no more than something out of a boy's dreaming? Out of his love of all things not of death made? All things somewhere beyond the dust, rust, and decay, beyond the top, beyond all sides, beyond bottom: outside, around, over, under, within?