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

I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.