There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.