I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.

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.

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.

High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.

I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

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.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.