In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.