You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.