This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

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

But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.

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