Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.

Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.