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

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

At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.