Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run.

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.