But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?

I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.