Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.