A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.