So now what? What happens when words fail us?

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

Human beings are millions of things in one day.

[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.