And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.

Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.

I feel like a lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing. And you just push through it. You fix what you can, and you let time pass.

After I’d told her – the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair – she said, ‘Did he kiss you?’ ‘John and Martin totally would have seen that,’ I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people – for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and maybe flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and I think that the psychological realism arises from that.