Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure.

When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.