...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.

I don't know what takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.

She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?