If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

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.

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.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

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