When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.

... as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.' If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?' Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.

There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.

Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.