Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.