I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

We all survive more than we think we can.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be