If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.

I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappointment them, or, if they do, the owners manages to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.