If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

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.