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.

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

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.

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 better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.