Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

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.

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

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