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.

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

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.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.