I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

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.

The young... are full of hope and discontent... And the old are those who were once discontented, but who have successfully smothered that flame and have found security and comfort in various ways.

You can't expect people to do the right thing or else they will go to hell. We are already in hell!

There is no more direct or honest person than Jim Clapper.

What is not possible is not to choose.

I think we can win it if my brain holds out.

Islam is a dangerous religion.

I would have a man generous to his country, his neighbors, his kindred, his friends, and most of all his poor friends. Not like some who are most lavish with those who are able to give most of them.

I am a law student in my first year at the law, and there are many moments when I am simply a mess.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.