Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding.

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

Writing is the most solitary of arts.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.