You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?

It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.

It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.

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

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.