no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

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.

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

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

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.