The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.

As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it