There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.