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.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

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.

Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

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.