She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.