If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?
And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.
What’s friendship’s realest measure?I’ll tell you. The amount of precious time you’ll squander on someone else’s calamities and fuck-ups.
People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her–the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.
Someone … tell us what’s important, because we no longer know.
With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.
My parents…were people running from the past, who didn’t look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.
Something draws you… An impatience with your own ignorance.
We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.
For writers – even sportswriters – bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.
She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn’t drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.
If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.
One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.
I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.
Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.
He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.
In their faces–plenty of them were handsome, but ruined–I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people’s rights and their sense of patriotism.