Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

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.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Prayer is supposed to be interaction with God.

Where the work goes, I go. Wherever adulation occurs, that's where you'll find me.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any

You, stupid one, who believe in laws which punish murder by murder...

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

Don't just play with your phone: go out and produce something.

I once went out with this girl, she was no bargain either, she showed up with pigtails under her arms.

Everyone who believes in God must have His revelation in his spirit, or else what he believes is not God but mere human wisdom, ideals or words. Such faith cannot endure the test.