There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.