[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

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.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

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