If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."

There were times where I felt I was pressing a little bit too hard with the humor, and I had to pull back, because the overriding concern of the book was to create this disease that had no cure and make you pay attention to every emotional stage of what happens.

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.