At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, otherness, and unexpectedness - something that comes from the outside.

In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care - so if it wasn't about love, what would be the point?

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the nature of the book he has to write, just at the moment when his advancing years and declining health have made him doubt that he's going to live long enough to write it. So he has to write against death like Scheherazade.

I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth.

Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation - like they say, the past is a foreign country - but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.