While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That’s more than connecting.

We’re all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.

I love Twitter. It’s like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you’re tired of them.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

If there’s a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it. You know how in New York there’s a lot of scaffolding? I won‘t walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck.

It’s not easy to make friends when you’re an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.

In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.

Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.

I’m a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

I love that he’s both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. … I love that within the world of Shakespeare‘s plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

Time is the currency – the highest valued currency we have now. And people giving you their time is so incredible. They don’t have to like your book, either. That’s a totally separate gift.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

While I know some women who are stunningly sanguine when they’re pregnant, I dissolve into a total mess. What normally appears sturdy turns fragile: the economy, the climate, humanity‘s baseline social contract.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.

My childhood was as conventional as you could get. I think I probably created ‘Arcadia‘ with a certain amount of wishful thinking. I would have loved to have more looseness and freedom and community.

I’m a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone‘s apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won’t work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won’t – and that’s fine.

Plays are just all sort of playful asides, and there’s a great deal of reference here to Greek mythology, plays, and dramas. The idea of the chorus is really important in Greek drama and I loved the idea of including that.

If there’s a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

Among so many things, ‘Time Passes‘ has shown me subversive ways of portraying time, of looking away from the human to the far more terrifying, far more immense texture of time beneath the minute span of a human life.

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.

Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

A lot of books about marriage are about marriages falling apart.