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?

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.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.