“What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.”

“You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.”

“Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.”

“As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.”

“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”

“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ”

“When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.”