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

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.