“Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.”

“Sometimes for me not throwing a tantrum is what running a marathon or swimming the English Channel must be like for others of a less-challenging emotional nature...”

“Walls, no less than writing, define civilization. They are monuments of resistance against time, like writing itself. . .”

“Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.”

“We all laced together—a brothel madam, an English professor, a mute cook, a quadroon cabbie, and me, the girl carrying a bucket of lies and throwing them like confetti.”

“It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier.”