As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

One of the reasons I always come back to representations of loneliness in plays, films, and literature is that they give us specific examples of the powerful hold that it has on us, and yet, paradoxically, by representing what can't really be represented, so to speak, they give us ways of going forward even as we fall apart.

None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.