Very early in my life it was too late.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.