School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

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.

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

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.