You only spoke a single line,yet it felt like a life sentence.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.