I hate that word dysfunction.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

Popularity has become its own justification.

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.