She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.