Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

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.

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.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

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.

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.