Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.