I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.

The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."