Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.