Popular success is a wonderful gift if it happens, but like money, it's not the motivation. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

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.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.

I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?

Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is?