QUOTES

♦ How can so many things become a bore by middle age – philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods – but heartbreak keeps its sting?

♦ But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself.

♦ Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

Here is something strange about growing old.
What’s that?

I meet new friends, and they are bald or they are gray. And I don’t know what color their hair used to be.

♦Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? It isn’t in us, it isn’t in human beings, to be tied to one person forever.

♦Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material. Robert never said anything of the sort. Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.

♦ An author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered.

♦ “It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more impatiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost any sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.”

♦“There’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning.”

♦ He wears no watch. His faith is fast.

♦ It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well.

♦ Life so often arrives all of a sudden.

♦ “I know I’m out of your life / But the day that I die / I know you are going to cry.”

What do I want from life? And I say: “Less!”