In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

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

Literature is not an instruction manual.

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.

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

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.