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

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

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.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.

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