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.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.