“Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.”

“Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.”

“In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.”

“the kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know.”

“It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.”

“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”

“Always try to remain calm....”