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

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Men generally do not see women as competition.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.