There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying.
It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.
Good literature makes your head throb heartlike.
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.
Every love story is a ghost story.
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I...