Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.

I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.