Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

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.

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

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.