Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which...

It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.

We fit the pieces of our life together in a pattern,but there is no image on the puzzlebox to guide us.

I’ve never known before what it feels like to want someone – not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe...

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.

For the first time in his life he understood why the Bible called sex “knowing”. Everything was different. Now he knew Dante. He’d known Dante. And wonder of wonders, Dante had known him right back.

Sometimes you go so far in your life,you can’t get backthough you know it’s not really your life.

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

She scowled at him until a light appeared in her intelligent eyes, as if she had had an epiphany. “Are you an illegal alien?

Whenever the sadness got too much, I would hire a rickshaw and go to the Upper Bazaar. Those little rickshaw trips to the market and back, shopping for lipsticks and imitation Gucci bags and wind-chimes...