I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didnt.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the readers opportunities to follow it at every step.