Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Doesn't matter where you go, home is uphill

I don't have any romantic ideas about marriage. Trust me. A white dress... ? No. It's not something for me.

The essence of wisdom is to see that there is always a solution once you realize that the mind, which seems to create so much suffering, has infinite potential to create fulfillment instead.

Of course, I also attribute some of my hearing loss to being in the infantry in World War II. It's probably a combination of heredity and noise exposure.

Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women.

I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one's ever done that before. As if I'm literally the first person to ever write a book.

I think we females have a lot of work to do for each other.

Everybody against me. Why? Why me? I have not brought violence to you. I have not brought Thug Life to America. I didn't create Thug Life. I diagnosed it.

We may have more control, but my point is that, strictly speaking, Rosneft is not a state company. I think that this is an obvious fact, as a foreign investor has a 19.7 percent stake in it.

Clear statement is argument.