You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just trash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.