In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you're always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out.

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

My other work, teaching, also is satisfying because I can be with people but in controlled circumstances, which aren't as likely to yield the pain of dealing with family.

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.