At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

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.

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.

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

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.