But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

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

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Success is a journey, not a destination.

He was gargoyle. Tonight, his mate would learn exactly what that meant.

Childish and slender creature! It seemed as if a linnet had hopped to my foot and proposed to bear me on its tiny wing.

To mourn is not to fear

I have been doing music all my life so everyday when I get up I expect music will be part of it.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.

The sooner you go down any path, the sooner you'll know what action to take.

I choose to believe that the same God who intervened to bring his Son back to life intervened on this day in history to help his people.

The nature of democracy is such that when there's - there'll be revulsion, obviously, towards - that's never going to happen again.