I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.

Sadness is very close to hate.

You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.