Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.

In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression.