We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.