Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

If you do everything you should do and do not do anything you should not do you will according to the best available statistics live exactly eighteen hours longer than you would otherwise.

There lives more faith in honest doubt Believe me than in half the creeds

It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pictures; it weaves fancies; it fills the future with delight.

We do not look for compromise; rather, we seek to resolve the conflict to everyone's complete satisfaction.

Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.

There are two kinds of directors in the theater. Those who think they are God and those who are certain of it.

I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.