Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.