Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but thought 'Husbands and Wives' was great.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.