“I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.”

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.

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.

All love – love of children, love of parents, love of God or life – comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.

My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.

Nurses nurse and teachers teach and tailors mend and preachers preach and barbers trim and chauffeurs haul and parents get to do it all.

Hip Hop has introduced us to a lot of genres that we probably wouldn’t even listen to in our own homes from our parents.

There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that’s control our children’s will–that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.

Google is one of the most incredible breakthroughs that we have today. Yes, it can scare a lot of patients, thinking we’re all dying because we look up something on Google. But there’s also a lot of anecdotal information from parents, firsthand accounts of what they did for their own child.

I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities.

Without intervention today, the cost of care for adults with autism will be significantly greater and the burden will no longer lie with the parents, but on our entire society.