She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

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!'

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Funny how people that don't believe in nothin' are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.

You must dream big and dream often. Take risks and see what happens.

The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

When it comes to government policy, can we please stop using words like "architect"? Telling people what to do is not a skilled profession.

There isn’t a nightclub in the world that you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you’re with some girl that really knocks you out.

Few men have imagination enough for reality.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Perfume must not be linked just to fashion because that means that one day it will go out of style.

And I... started off dumb, raised by the hoodrats, listen to the radio wishin that i could rap.