I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.