Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.

In fact, it's become politically important to offend people, because we have to fight back against this notion that being offensive should be against the law or something, and that everyone supposedly deserves "respect" for their often dopy views.

When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.