She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.

To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.

I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.

I feel like as I've gotten older I've unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.