Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

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

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

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

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.

I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison.