If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

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