Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

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.

Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.