You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

There is such a shelter in each other.