I am very sincere. Some people are always kidding, so when you're not, it's going to seem annoying to them.

Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.

A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.

There's all different kinds of people, but I don't think it's that unusual that once you get like a little power, you get to do your weird thing even more.

My earliest memory is aged three, seeing sunlight on water and feeling it was really magical.

I'm always the kind of friend or girlfriend who suggests, when there's some cataclysmic problem in the relationship, I'm like, "Well, maybe we can come up with a creative activity that will help us out." I'm like, "Let's get out the pens! Draw a picture of how much you hate me!"

After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.