To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

Writing is the most solitary of arts.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.