When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

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

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.

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

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.