How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

We are most alive when we're in love.

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.