I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

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.

The water and the wind will wear the wood down, until only water and wind remain.

Every surgeon carries about him a little cemetery in which from time to time he goes to pray a cemetery of bitterness and regret of which he seeks the reason for certain of his failures.

TOMS didn't have to focus on advertising, but on giving in a way that's sustainable.

I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

You have your own difficulties. We watch, with friendly confidence in your capacity to merge differences in the grand dream of Canadian design.

The name of peace is sweet and the thing itself good, but between peace and slavery there is the greatest difference.

Never date a woman you can hear ticking.

Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope which brings about change, which produces new realities, is what opens man's road to freedom.