You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done.