“I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.”

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I’ve come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.

Being with him was like being alone underwater – everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I’ve always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife’s a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

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.

I was built this way for a reason, so I’m going to use it.

No one should question the faith of others, for no human being can judge the ways of God.

I think it’s way harder when you have success, ’cause people tend to not treat you the same or look at you the same because they see the success or the money you make.

I think everyone is beautiful in their own way.

The way is near, but men seek it afar. It is in easy things, but men seek for it in difficult things.

I’ve had happy moments in my life, but I don’t think that happiness– being happy– is a perpetual state that anyone can be in. Life isn’t that way.

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

Wisdom leads us back to childhood.