I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.