Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

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 pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.