Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.