Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.

Bruno, my old faithful. I haven't sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.

It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.