The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.