But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all.

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.