I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

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.

You couldn't make up something that looked so right.

Who knew that all this time the nectar of the Gods was in my va-jay-jay.

We have recognized that the world is changing. How your children are behaving, how their friends are behaving. What they consume and what they watch.

The love of domination never attains more than a factitious elevation, that is sure to make enemies of all its neighbours.

The exercises helped get the flexibility back in my ankle and also increased my overall flexibility. As I was getting into my 30s, I wanted to do everything I could to improve my longevity.

As far as I'm concerned, Twitter has wiped out Facebook. I'm done with Facebook.

Start going the extra mile and opportunity will follow you.

Seeing' as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.

I'm as happy as I can be-but I have been happier.