“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

“I dont go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.”

“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”

“Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the ...”

“Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.”

“Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck i...”

“She asked if I loved another woman, so I answered honestly and said, Dinner was great, but I could go for dessert.”

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”

“Poppy: What makes you think I'm having dinner with you?Jake: Because you can't sit in your room and eat ice cream and chips two nights in a row. You'll get scurvy. You need vitamin C.”

“Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and ma...”

“School should be the best party in town”

“Every nation has its war party... It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition.”

“We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I wil...”

“I'm always amazed at anyone's interest in what I have to say.”

“The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.”