When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.