I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level.

For someone like me and my generation, you had to speak French to be sophisticated, you had to be lighter-skinned.

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

I love a lot of American writers, but I think that for the most part the scope of what's accepted as great American writing is very limited. What we have is good, but it's limited. There's not enough engagement with the world. Our literature's not adventurous enough. The influence of MFA writing tends to make things repetitive. The idea that writing can be taught has changed the whole conversation in the U.S.