Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.