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.

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

You can't find peace by avoiding life.

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?

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

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.