I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.