This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

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.

Forgiving and being forgiven frees our souls and lightens our load.

For the record, I want to be anywhere you are, " he murmured in her ear, so close he might as well have run his tongue along it.

In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen in small matters as they are.

I would say that in the past year I have had to begrudgingly admit that I am finally a success of some level, sure.

I think the Iranians are clearly determined to have a nuclear program. And we have to assume that with a nuclear program they have the capability and the will to create a nuclear weapon.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.

The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life.

I write and play music. I'd like to be a musician at some point.

You cannot evolve unless you are willing to change.