A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

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.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.