If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. … The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.