You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

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.

Like dust brushed from an old painting, as we journey beneath the surface layers of life, another landscape is revealed.

It is impossible to get result without action.

He tangles his hand in my hair, and the other cups my jaw. Although I have this all planned, his lips feel shockingly sweet, swollen and soft, and more like home every time

A literary achievement of the highest order.

When I got to match point in the final I was afraid I'd be a little nervous, but I just said, You have to stay focused, just think about what you have to do.

Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody.

I like playing the guy on the sidelines. They have more fun.

When you stop being afraid you feel good

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.

The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.