I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened — I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in.

my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.

Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it's hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive.