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.

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.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

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.

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

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

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.