“If we have nothing to write about but nothing to write about, then that is what we have to write about.”

“Without writing, I sometimes suspect there would be no such thing as love.”

“We can only re-tell stories; we attempt, in doing so, to tell new stories. Is there a way out of this bind? I think the trick is to enter into it completely. Avoid purity. The idea of perfection sounds awfully boring.”

“Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.”

“We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.”

“I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.”

“Nothingness is everything to philosophers. If you wonder what everything is, then you also wonder what nothing is. The question is whether you can talk about it and still make sense. Heidegger thought that although being and nothing are not something, we nevertheless have a sense of them in moods like anxiety, joy and boredom. I’m writing a book about Heidegger, which means I’m writing about nothing. The good thing about nothing is that there’s so much of it. Pretty much everywhere you go, there it is.”