“Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.”

I’m an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard’s books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work – the pursuit of darkness, the negative – and I think in some sense I’ve internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can’t just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

I’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion.

You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms – the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them.

My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

It’s lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I’ve made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There’s joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it’s not yours.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.

When you look at women who have had plastic surgery, they have lost something – usually an expression, something unique to their face.

Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.

I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass.

Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.

I’m always looking to rock out. But it isn’t really about rocking out versus being mellow, in terms of your personal satisfaction. In the end, you just want to be good.

I think the Republican Party is… accurately defined as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy.

I look at the Senior Al Gore that I had the chance to serve in the Senate with. A great human being. He went down to defeat to this right wing bunch back at the time.

We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.