When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.