Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Blank pages inspire me with terror.

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

If we read books all the time we would be very unhealthy, as we would not get any fresh air, exercise, or contact with nature. Also we would not spend time with other people. There are a lot of plusses to reading - it's an interactive brain workout - but like everything else that's beneficial in moderation, overdoses can be dangerous.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.