In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

A man never got a woman back... not by begging on his knees.

You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes one kind.

Some people are graced with a flow; some people are graced with something less than a flow. I'm one of those.

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.

[Prozac] didn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on my melancholy, my dark vision, and everything else that I'd taken it for.