No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.