“But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?”

You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.

When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn’t sustain my interest.

I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.

and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.

As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.

There’s a gift in your lap and it’s beautifully wrapped and it’s not your birthday.

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.

A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you’re alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you’re that important.

I want to be violated by insight.

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

It’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind’s clothing with more sooty knowledge.

Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation!

No matter what face he wears, Satan has one overmastering ambition, one burning desire-to dethrone the Almighty and to place himself upon the highest throne of the universe.

The chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down.

You could smell them because of the oil they were burning.

I have a burning desire to entertain and different mediums allow me to do this in different ways.