I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

Tangled in one another's arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.

There’s something really rich and powerful in not talking about what you need to talk about sometimes.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?