It's a critical fallacy of our times ... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radishes: 'grow,' or there's something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.