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

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.

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.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?'

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.