“As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.”

“[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.”

“Ethics is a dream.”

“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”

“When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”

“When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.”

“Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.”