Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

…it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.” p28

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.

I really do work in solitude.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian’s. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when...

I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill...

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking...

…the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.

Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not...

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I...

What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can...

I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the...

[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came,...

Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It...

Well — think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no — hang on — this is a...

If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because...

…I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story....

The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

Es muy ruso quejarse continuamente de lo mal que van las cosas. Si la vida te va bien, cállatelo. No vayas a tentar al diablo…

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from...

Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.