Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.