Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.