It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

An indigo snake leaves a lasting impression.

There’s a lot of phones; but I’m out of that field. They make me feel like a prisoner of war; there’s not going to be any texting for me. The pre-paid phone is the frontier of my technological advance.

Even if you’re the worst writer in the world, at least you’ll have the evidence.

That’s part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

I’ve had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one’s potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O’Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

Writing books is a nice retreat. There’s nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

I don’t know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

If the observation were made to you that “Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met,” would you be inclined to agree?