The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

A good book is an education of the heart.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures