Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.

Trees're always a relief, after people.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.

Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.

Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.

Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.

Ideals make reason inaccessible.

Those who have easy cheerful attitudes tend to be happier than those with less pleasant temperaments regardless of money "making it " or success.

I' ve won awards. And they didn't make me feel bad winning them. They made me feel pretty good. But it also did not make me feel bad NOT winning the Academy Award.

To me the biggest irony of this lifetime that I'm living is that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the creative ways that I do, I actually don't enjoy being in the public eye.

Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.

The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?

There is still nothing in life as constant and as changing at the same time as an afternoon at a ballpark.

The bigger you are, the harder they come down on you

Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.