He responded a few minutes later. Okay. I wrote back. Okay. He responded: Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering

Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.

How about I call you when I finish this?” “But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said. “I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.” He broke out into that goofy smile. “A nd you say we don’t know each other.