“Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.”

“My books have all been very deeply felt. You don’t spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I’ve been serious. But I don’t do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don’t write book reviews. I don’t sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don’t go to writer conferences. I don’t teach writing seminars. I don’t hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I’m not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I’m not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don’t think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don’t think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.”

“You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you”

“No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other. You're not ever gonna know me.”

“If you can’t make a girl come why even bother? That always seemed to me to be like writing questions in a letter.”

“My pain is constant and sharp...this confession has meant nothing”

“My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.”