Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, ev...
She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I
People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, eve...
It’s only recently that I had any idea that how a person felt about libraries—not schools or hospitals, libraries—could even represent an ideological split. I thought a library was one of the few site...
It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God’s idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy.
In this lengthy riposte, the philosopher informs Paulinus that learning how to live takes a whole life, and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: It is not that...
How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?
Hey! 'Hey!'But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes.
Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, change...
Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One
But darling, I am clean. Two years clean. Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills . . . I said I’m clean, not a bloody Mormon!
All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn’t leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn’t add some permanent treasure to the world, isn’t worth doing… This is my...
A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Fiction can’t be written to comply with winning arguments.
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. ~ Archie Jones
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
She held herself apart, always.
Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.