She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.