We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be "squishy" and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.

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

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

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.

Whenever I sign books, I get this line over and over again from men: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does. Would you sign the book to her?" What are those men doing there? And where are their wives?