Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
What you’re normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me – how really tenuous our sanity is.
On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
If you want to understand what you’re thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.
Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.
There’s a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn’t been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they’re evading writing.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
In terms of work, I never felt that I’ve done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.
Mourning has its place but also its limits.
Anything worth having has its price.
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.