Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

He was too clever. If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.

... perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less...

She'd been imagining for the last fifteen or more years that if you disappeared, if you abandoned a wife and child, you did so for a better life: more happiness, more sex, more money, more of whatever...

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it's read, and by the time it's trendy it's already a force for conservatism?

Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

You like this stuff?' she asked neutrally. 'Good to dance to,' I replied, a little defensively. 'Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?' 'No, not really.' Though of course I did.

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... {People say} you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of...

between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish.

I know one thing for sure: that an objective time exists, but that there is also the subjective one, the one that leads to the wrist inside, right next to the heart pulsations. And this personal time,...

Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less...

Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?

You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a...

Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as...

Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual...

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.