Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.