What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.