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

I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.

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.

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

There is such a shelter in each other.