“I have spent years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of . . . people who do not exist.”

“I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

“I have spent my life laboriously doing nothing.”

“I thought you had forgotten me.”“I have spent my life remembering you.”

“I spent the first twenty-five years of my life apologizing for people like Harald because we're family. Then I discovered that being related is no guarantee of love and I had a few reasons to defend Harald.”

“This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.”