This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, "Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death." Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.