I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.