A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.
If I looked like you, Debra, I’d masturbate all the time
Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.
Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty forei...
What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he is dead?
These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.
In fact, he talked about his painful and insidious cancer so plainly and without affect that to this day, I consider matter-of-factness a form of courage.
I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.
How can you not feel like a whole city of people waiting for it to finally be over, a whole city tending a parent’s slow death?
He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.
And we want car wrecks. We say we don't. But we love them. To look is to love. A thousand people drive past the statue of David. Two hundred look. A thousand people drive past a car wreck. A thousand...
You broke up two marriages, and faked a young woman’s illness, and bribed her to get an abortion—all in the first chapter—
The scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had...
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children's BMX bikes than in any other city in the world.
Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't be said; maybe every relationship started over every tim...
I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d acted on my own, when I wasn’t driven by my gr...
He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.
For years. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that...
Everyone sees the same movie, but every reader experiences a different book, because reading involves you in hours of active, creative work, the characters, their movements and thoughts re-created in...