We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

August is a wicked month.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

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.

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

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.