It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.

I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left.

It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?

It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it.