You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

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

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.

As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.