Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

There is always room for at least two truths.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.