Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don’t bother to wrap it, thanks. I’ll eat it here.

She better not die this time,” I guess I said.

What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

I’ve been very self-indulgent and weird and I’m sorry. But I’d really like to die.

If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I do, and as I have, in part to explore this terra incognita, this dangerous ground I seem to need to risk.

Never use ‘submit’ as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say ‘offer,’ and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.

Good art is a form of prayer. It’s a way to say what is not sayable.

....he knew that he'd run into his destiny as a man in the dark walks into a wall.

No matter his joking, I thought, this was a man as given to the miseries as I was. You could look into my dead face and find my living eyes. In his case, the life and death were reversed, and the flesh of his face was living ground, while his eyes were little monuments to lifelessness buried therein.

It is the kind of moment life gives us when it laughs. It is choosing without choice. A rich meagerness, that.