I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

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.

I've screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.

The mind is a maze that only you can conquer

Maybe there is no such thing as success—a final destination where you arrive once and for all. Maybe existence is a never-ending journey of peaks and valleys and forever chasing dreams.

I was going to kiss him, and I was going to regret it. But at that moment, I couldn't bring myself to care.

I liked being a teenager, but I would not go back for all the tea in China.

He is improving all the time. He is only 21 and who knows what he is capable of. (on Cristiano Ronaldo)

It isn't love when another person cannot give you the space to live your own life.

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.

I’m a capitalist, not a corporatist. I’m not someone who believes we should be bailing out corporations whether their auto industries, or banks.

My mother is extraordinary; she's a superwoman, like so many other single mothers who are out there.