With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

I don’t know what’s the matter with me, why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

Once I am in the square circle, I am in my home.

So many nights I cried myself to sleep. Now that you love me, I love myself. I never thought I would say this. I never thought there'd be you.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

motivation is highest when the probability of success is 50 percent: We don't get involved if the task is too easy or too hard.

I don't think success arrives and you're suddenly happy. It's not like that. If people think that they'll be very disappointed.

There is absolutely no point in sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself. The great power you have is to let go ... focus on what you have, no that which has been mean or unkindly removed.

That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.