And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.