She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

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.

I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.

I find it very difficult to talk about unwritten works. It's never useful to start putting words casually around the flimsiest of notions. I finished Saturday only in late November and I'm now in the rather pleasant stage of traveling, reading and waiting.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.