Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

The best revenge is living well without you.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

Much in our lives is chance.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.