On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.

Anything worth having has its price.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.