...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.