What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.

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?