I don't believe in God, but I miss him.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.