Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

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.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.