The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.

You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.

The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway.

You think that what I’ve told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.

You can’t reconstruct a story – you can’t even know what the story is – if everyone is saying, “Mistakes were made.” Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it’s history anyway, so let’s forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there’s anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She’s wreckage. It’s as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.