A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

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.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.