For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.