I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

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.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

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

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.