...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

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