You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.