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.

In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.

Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.

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

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

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.