How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?

And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.