I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

The trouble with excuses, however, is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple of times.

The only things I regret, and the only things I'll ever regret are things I didn't do. In the end, that's what we mourn. The paths we didn't take. The people we didn't touch.

It was a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it's true. It's too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when were too young to handle it.

No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her.

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.

All I wanted was what I'd already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else.