Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening.

Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.