War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
Most of our miseries we bring on ourselves. And they're the sum of our own stupidity.
I didn't know how to say goodbye. Words were stupid. They said so little. Yet they opened up holes you could fall into and never climb out of again.
Love is like light and there are two kinds, the bursting fireworks of the moment and the solid, fixed stars that sometimes become obscured in the heavens, but are always there, year after year, for a lifetime.
When I wrote, I felt better, as if I had remade the world all of a piece, the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was.
A person has to be strong in life. A person must practice strength, even if they don't feel it.
And in that moment I possessed and lost the whole world and everything in it and was left with the feeling and the knowledge, which is love, that no matter how we give ourselves we always end up losing. That to love is to lose, the moment we agree to the bargain. And that, being human, we keep standing there wanting to lose more.
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
I think there are people who do write regionally, because that's their subject matter - the way the sunset looks over a strip mall, memories of flirting at the ice rink, waking up to a deer at the window. . . Up to now, that hasn't been mine.
The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.
The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.