Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.

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.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Sow something positive to somebody's life and you'll get that positivity back to your life because you reap what you sow.

Immortality may be impossible, but imagine what humanity could learn if we all lived 700 years. We could travel deep into utopia and beyond.

Until presence becomes your predominant state, you may find yourself moving back and forth for a while between the old consciousness and the new, between mind identification and presence.

Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.

Ronnie Barker will forever be remembered as one of the great comic actors.

A good marriage is worth fighting for.

You have not traveled enough," she said. "Or you'd know that every journey makes its own map across your heart.