You're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll yo….

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the….

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful..

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others..

All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take car….

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way..

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer..

When I was young I believed that "nonfiction" meant "true." But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in ….

Inside the peach, there is a stone..

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so….

The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four t….

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation. In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each r….

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters mov….

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the….

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous..

A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught st….

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't..

The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subo….

We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is n….

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: wh….

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace..