“Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.”

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.

The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.