The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

No one is exempt from talking nonsense the misfortune is to do it solemnly.

The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

The biggest lesson we have to give our children is truth.

In some ways, when you re-envision a song like that ["Never Be Mine"], there's a completely different energy to it each night.

If the audience doesn't like it, usually they're just silent. But they've never all walked out at once.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her.

You don't know what I'm going to say until I say it and that's because I'm only looking at the facts and the evidence.