She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!