My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.