As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

There is no weather in malls.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.