I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.