the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

Being able to laugh got me through.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

If you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.