Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.

I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

If you think of something, do it. Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:that Scotland has so few trees.