When I'm working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

... everyone must play his role.

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

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

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.