What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
Oh, I’ve become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn’t this great race.
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
I’ve yet to meet somebody who said, ‘Your stories are so revolting I couldn’t read them.’
I’m quite good at not writing.
I wouldn’t mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don’t play the guitar.
Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Now, I’m an atheist. I really don’t believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel – especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.