I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

Living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

When you finish one book, you don’t want to just write the same book again.

Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

I was aware that you weren’t supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

Something crucial about depression ... The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don’t start extremely early. Richard Ford gets up at 6 in the morning and writes till midday. I tend to get up late and start at maybe 10 o’clock and work through the day until evening. And that schedule accords with family life, and, you know, I have a daughter. If I lived alone I think I might stay up later and start later in the day. But I sort of have to keep it like a professional job. Like a 9-to-5 job, but seven days a week.

It’s a myth that I didn’t talk about my past. I don’t think there was ever a period where I particularly did that, any more than anybody else. Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be. Maybe I’ve done that. I have no secrets -- that I know of.

I think what takes me a long time is that the events that are happening to the characters almost have to happen to me. I'm living the book out as they're experiencing it. When I'm writing a section, sometimes I'm trying it 5, 10, or 15 different ways until I find the one that feels right. The language might be right, but the kinds of things they say or the decisions they make might not be right. It's not always easy to predict what they should do that quickly. I have to bathe in what's going on in the book to figure out what's right. Also, I'm a little uncertain about my decisions. So, sometimes I'll have the right strategy for a scene on the second draft, but I won't trust that, and I'll write 10 other drafts in order to convince myself that number two was the right solution. There's a lot of one step forward, two steps back, at least in my writing.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant.

What I do as a writer, I work with situations, characters, certain situations and characters that appeal to me. And then, I try to imagine them and write the story that seems to flow from them. At a certain point, I can realize the themes are merging from this. But I never start from a thematic point of view, that I'm going to write about reinvention of self, identity, or any of these things. Usually, after the book is finished and I start talking about it, that it becomes analytical in that way. And in some ways it's a distortion of what the process has been, writing the book.

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

I spent the greater part of my early career just thinking about prose and language. I think The Virgin Suicides is a book that really relies on its voice. The novelists that I admired when I was starting out were writers like Nabokov and Martin Amis — stylists, really. Not entirely, but obviously it's their prose style that they're known for, and that gives you so much pleasure to read. So, that's how I started out, just trying to figure out how to write a decent sentence, and I was taught by John Hawkes at Brown, who was a stylist himself. He made me very attentive to language and clichéd lines and what bad writing is.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

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