[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

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.