In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

Ethics is a dream.

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories. I’m no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering...

When I’m writing, I’m waiting to see somebody, and I’m waiting to hear them. It’s almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

Everybody should customize their names.

The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.

At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that...

After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I’m a malcontent and you can’t change that.

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.