Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?

I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

There's a lot of phones; but I'm out of that field. They make me feel like a prisoner of war; there's not going to be any texting for me. The pre-paid phone is the frontier of my technological advance.

I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

Even if you're the worst writer in the world, at least you'll have the evidence.

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting.