She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. [...] The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

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.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.