Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away.

She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving...But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.

The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

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