Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

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.

V had a passing thought that she used the word "anyway" like an eraser on a crowded chalkboard. She said it whenever she needed to clear off the things she'd just shared to make room for more.

First no tooth fairythen no santaand no godand then your parents are only humanyour government is corruptand the universe is a hologram.

When you start learning how to give when you're young, when you get older it is second nature. Just like stealing. Start young and you keep on stealing forever. Ask my politicians.

There needs to be leadership in the heartland of America.

Let me show you how it's done... Loser!

I'm a private person too, and we don't ever film anything in our home because it's off limits. It's like letting people see your messy house.

Anyone who tells you that the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally has simply spent too much time in Washington.

Power is the ability not to have to please.

Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.