I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.