The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.