Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.