One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

The balls do not make a writer.

You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.