Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

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.

In the human society, it is difficult to find all angels flapping there wings and all saints singing halleluya.

And?” I crossed my arms over my chest. I almost tapped my foot waiting for him to answer, but caught myself and held my foot still. That would have been weird—way too much like my mother. ~Milayna

O Lord let me not live to be useless!

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

What do you imagine the American people would think of me if I wasted my time going to the ball game?

Sitting beside the pool is fine for two weeks, but after that I think it'd be quite hard to live with - so I need to keep racing.

The door to the invisible must be visible.

[when asked by his secretary if she should destroy all files that were over ten years old] Yes, but keep copies.

Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment's glance.