Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

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.

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.

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

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.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.