To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.