Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Just to pose certain questions is, I guess, to show your hope they can be answered.

Keeing busy” is the remedy for all the ills in America. It’s also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

But he doesn’t love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love–the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn’t happen. No love. People meet,...

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there’s no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to “overcome” doubt.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the...

FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER!By the time the kidnapped turquoise-and-chrome car overturns–turns and turns and turns!–in a snow-drifted field north of Tydeman’s Corners Legs Sadovsky will have driven eleven miles from Eddy’s Smoke Shop on Fairfax...

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can’t exercise memory until you’ve removed yourself from memory’s source.

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled...

Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems...

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo – that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident...

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they...

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn’t want to put restraints on “robber barons”-he might become one one day!

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to...

Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

There are some secrets so toxic you can’t share. Especially if you love who it is you’d have to share with.

If she lets us down, if she’s weird sometimes—just ignore it, and love her. Just love her.

There is an hour, a minute – you will remember it forever – when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don’t know – can’t know...

In love there are two things — bodies and words.

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you’re no longer their child.

The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem.” This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or...

A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind...

I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I...

I’d like to be your friend—but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.

hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all...

Our house is made of glass… and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser;...

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

playdate” is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you’ve been awaiting.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring...

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It’s technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day–a way of relating.

So you don’t believe we have souls I guess?” and Legs laughed and said, “Yeah probably we do but why’s that mean we’re gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn’t it, while...

One man’s insanity is another man’s genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

Can compromise be an art? Yes–but a minor art.

The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being – her ‘visibility’ – figures so prominently in...