You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.