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" It's true that your environment influences how you write. "

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" I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it. "

" If anything is scary about my writing, it's that it's the product of a very particular vision and doesn't reference common speech that heavily. By 'common speech,' I don't mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand. "

" At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn't really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling. "

" People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it. "

" I've noticed women my age and a little younger, anywhere from 35 to 50, saying, 'Who would want to bring kids into a world like this?' Or, 'I don't want to spend my life that way. I want to do my artwork.' And they're very unapologetically stating this. "

" I didn't start thinking about what I wanted to do professionally until I was 17. I was a hippie, but I did write. "

" Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker. "

" Having watched television, I would kind of play the role or picture myself on a television show or something like that. That's maybe always been true of a certain type of kid, even before television maybe, but I think it's been amplified to an insane level. "

" The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either. "

" I loved to read and would read anything that roused my interest, whether it was below my age level or above it, even if I could barely make sense of it. "

" I think a lot of writing, or a lot of young writers, especially, hold themselves back unnecessarily because they're so upset about the idea that they might be sentimental or so concerned about being criticized that way or even being that way that they just shy away from any strong expression or emotion. "

" Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.' "

" I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons. "

" Anne Frank's diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so. "

" The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility. "

" I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?' "

" I don't think that the Internet creates feelings that aren't there, nor does it provide an outlet. On the contrary, what I have thought about things like computer games - what has disturbed me about them - is that they appear to stimulate feelings of aggression without providing any physical release. "

" Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing. "

" One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings. "

" Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual. "

" What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else? "

" When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama. "

" A sad person who is so involved with his sadness that he mistakes it for reality will have a hard time seeing himself as anything but sad. For him, the sadness is not a feeling that he experiences - it is him. "

" The first person to blow up my fashion consciousness was a 14-year-old girl named Sandrine. She was the most beautiful human I had ever seen. "

" Sometimes I decide I don't want to write because it isn't the thing for me to be doing right then, and I go do something else. "

" I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing. "

" My first and strongest memories about perfume come from childhood, from my mother, and they are a complex blend of her private and public selves. "

" I don't know if I can say exactly what I seek in books, but one of them would be to deepen and expand my understanding of the world. "

" Not being locked into one set of feelings, which you run the risk of mistaking for the truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out. "

" For two people to satisfy everything each needs for their entire lives is a tall order. Some couples may be equipped to do this. Some are not. "