Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.

Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.

Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each other.