Literature is not an instruction manual.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

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

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.

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.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

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.