This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.