Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.