As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.

I can imagine anything except having no imagination.

I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.