I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

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

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.