I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.

Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

I love the feeling of being on the hunt - the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.

I really wanted to be allowed to the [writer's] table. So it makes me happy to be at the table. It sounds a little shallow, but if I imagine the shadow life, where I didn't get that chance, and all the ways my negative inclinations would have bloomed if I hadn't gotten the attention, but also the creative outlet ... I'm not actually that happy. I have multiplicities. My happiness blooms and it wilts.

If you could press a button and your ego investment was less, the toothache would be less. Or less tragic at least.

She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.

Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.