First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?

We're frightened of what makes us different.

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.

We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.