There's a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there's a reason why there's the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there's a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it's not something we think of for women.

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people like the Chekhov story The Lady With the Little Dog.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? I'll always find the hardest path.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.