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

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

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.