“The sexuality doesn’t end. It really doesn’t. You’re sexual your whole life, if you’re a sexual person.”

It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel

Why does life need evidence of life?

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

To one end let us aim our thoughts, and to one end let us aim our souls. Hail, dawn of liberty, behind thee is the redeeming sun.

Terrific. Now to win a larceny trial all we have to do is prove how the universe ends.

All’s well in the end, if you’ve only the patience to wait.

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

In everything we ought to look at the end.

One should never pursue the hazards of fortune to their very ends andit behooves all adventurers to treat their good luck with reverence, neither bothering nor upsetting it.

It is best, if possible, to deceive no one; for he that begins by deceiving others, will end by deceiving himself.

I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end