Every Man With His Own Peculiar Vice.

Every Man With His Own Peculiar Vice. His Will Hardly Rock Heaven Or Hell.

Even If People Laughed At The Notion Of Goodness, If They Found It Sentimental, Or Nostalgic, It Didn't Matter -- It Was None Of Those Things, He Said, And It Had To Be Fought For.

I Was Fascinated By The Lack Of A Word For A Parent Who Has Lost A Child. We Have No Word In English. I Thought For Sure There'd Be A Word In Irish But There Is None. And Then I Looked In Several Other Languages And Could Not Find One, Until I Found The Word Sh'khol In Hebrew. I'm Still Not Sure Why So Many Languages Don't Have A Word For This Sort Of Bereavement, This Shadowing.

Novels Are More Difficult Simply Because They Are Longer And Require More Juggling, But Short Stories Are Closer To Perfection, If You Can Get The Language Right.

Sometimes We Just Walk Into Something That Is Not For Us At All. We Pretend It Is. We Think We Can Shrug It Off Like A Coat, But It's Not A Coat At All, It's More Like Another Skin. [...] All I Wanted Was To Make My Life Thrilling For A While: To Take The Oridinary Objects Of My Days And Make A Different Argument Out Of Them, No Obligations To My Past.