It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

Some of the common occurrences of injustice are the presence of poverty, starvation, gender inequality, neglected widows and orphans and the injustice towards other vulnerable groups of people.

The eternal struggle between failure and fortune is a fight not between mortal enemies but sparring partners. So fortune is improved by failure, and the reverse is also true.

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

Ethics is not just an abstract intellectual discipline. It is about the conflicts that arise in trying to meet real human needs and values.

Self-love then does not constitute THIS or THAT to be our interest or good; but, our interest or good being constituted by nature and supposed, self-love only puts us upon obtaining and securing it.

Success demands paranoia.

A lot of people don't know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Molière and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

I grew up with a real appreciation about just how wonderful and intimate the relationship is between a doctor and a patient was and the sense that this was a noble profession.