I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

How we dress is, as far as I can tell, the only inescapably public choice that we have. People don't need to know what you eat, people don't need to know who you have sex with. But there's no escaping what you wear and the fact that you've chosen it. Even if you insist that you don't care about fashion, that's your statement. It's really one realm of life where you are forced to make your own statement.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.