The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

After love a formal feeling comes.