I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
With writing, we have second chances.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.
It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.
The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.
I said, ‘I need to know how he died.’ He flipped back and pointed at, ‘Why?’ So I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing.
Every moment before this one depends on this one.
And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.
I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn’t want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
We cracked up together, which was necessary, because she loved me again.
I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
Your dad didn’t die, so I won’t be able to explain it to you.
Writing’s funny, it’s like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you’ve written.
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.