“I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image and get straight to the heart of things. Somehow, words seemed big enough to contain pain, and sentences could pull broken bits together.”

“Somehow, my whole existence had become a really complicated word problem. I'd always sucked at those.”

“Somehow the silence seemed to connect us in a way like words never could.”

“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm.”

“My hindsight seemed unbearably clear tonight. I could see every mistake I'd made, every bit of harm I'd done, the small things and the big things.”

“Offstage, I couldn't put things into words, and that was the one thing I'd always been able to rely on. Putting my feelings into words and praying they wouldn't be able to get out again.”