What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.