And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.