Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.