“I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.”

“According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.”

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

“Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human b...”

“To observe life as an inevitability and to observe the nuanced stratification of life are two completely different points of view on life.”

“Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary ...”

“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story w...”

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes y...”

“I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when Im working on a story, Ill find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where theyve taken the story. Its as if ...”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”