Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.