“Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.”

“There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart o...”

“There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.”

“As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.”

“The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book...”

“My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from t...”

“I'll never wake up in a good mood again.I'm tired of these stinky boots”

“Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?”

“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.”

“She was pretty sure Seth had practiced all his facial expressions and gestures in front of a mirror, and worked out which ones made him look like a cross between an Abercrombie model and a kitten.”

“New becomes stale and old becomes fresh. The impractical, ageing estate long ago left behind to Singapore's pioneers and their homemade tofu stalls takes on a certain irreverence and originality; a...”

“When we reached the lobby outside the office, moving like a pair of power walkers--no running in the halls of Green Pastures because there was too much chance of knocking over one of the many ether...”