"A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known."

"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."

"I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth."

"When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice."

"This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone."

"A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting."

"The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes."

"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."

"One man's insanity is another man's genius, someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity."

"You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal."

"This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash."

"How exhausted I am suddenly!-though this has been Ray's best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling-almost-exhilarated."

"I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes."

"That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can't confront it."

"A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know."

"I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart."

"Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light."

"Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity."

"These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us."

"A daydreamer is prepared for most things."

"Nor do I like being told upsetting news-unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions."

"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."

"I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life."

"I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life."

"I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it."

"The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love."

"Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind."

"Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child."