Morning, Peter, she calls.

Some suggestions for you :

You have failed in the most base and human of ways--you have not imagined the lives of others.

It's stores, it's the whole thing, all that shit everywhere, 'scuse me, that merchandise, all those goods, and ads screaming at you from all over the place, buy buy buy buy buy, and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, 'Can I help you?', it's all I can do not to scream, 'Bitch, you can't even help yourself.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

She is an attractive, robust, fleshy, large-headed woman several years younger than Laura (it seems that every one, suddenly, is at least slightly younger than she).

A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.

I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.

He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess.

I've been just wondering lately, if this is, you know, it. An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

There is so little love in the world.

This is a Southern gift, isn't it - tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That's what they mean by Southern charm, right?

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.