Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

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

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.