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

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

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.

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

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.