Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

People rarely do what they don't want to.

What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial - or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.