I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

I was unemployable when I got out of college.