You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.

… she gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness: uninvited and tireless.

I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.

I dont really have an office or anything, and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a cafe, back to the library, that kind of thing.

I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.

As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.

[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated.