On writing: I don’t like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.
Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that.
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
Some idiotic things are well worth doing.
You can’t always go to the well and have things be funny.
Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can’t, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That’s why I don’t review books.
Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.
I’m trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that’s one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
I’m not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.
Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.
Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
What was our life like? I almost don’t remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.
Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.
Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.
Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.