We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.