"It's a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone."

"I walk up the Larz Anderson Bridge, thinking of Faulkner and Quentin Compson, remembering Quentin as I would an old love, with a swollen heart, Quentin who buckled under the weight of Southern sins, who cracked the crystal on the corner of the dresser and twisted the hands off his grandfather's watch his last morning and, later in the afternoon, cleaned his hat with a brush before he left his Harvard dorm room to kill himself.
Halfway across the river I hoist myself on the wide parapet, swing my legs over the edge, and look down in the water for Quentin's body. How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she's ever known? How do you create a character like that?"

"I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them."

" 'You're a gambler. You gambled. You bet the farm.'
'On this novel? That was a bad bet. I can't even finish it.'
'Not on the novel. Your success or failure is not based on what happens with that pile of papers. On yourself. On your fantasies. So what do you want now, at age thirty-one?' "

"This is not nothing."