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...

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Living’s immediacy, you go full sail, you’re in a fever of motion. Until it’s safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, “Yes I was happy then,...

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the...

You people who have survived childhood don’t remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be...

I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo...

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no ‘morality’. For what’s ‘morality’ but a leash around the neck? A noose? What’s ‘morality’ but what other people want you to...

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl....

I’m sure all that you’ve heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

The distinction between “assistant” and intern” is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed – neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica,...

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don’t...

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or ‘fearlessly’- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though...