...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

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

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

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

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.

My stories are never quite good enough