At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.

While I know some women who are stunningly sanguine when they're pregnant, I dissolve into a total mess. What normally appears sturdy turns fragile: the economy, the climate, humanity's baseline social contract.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it. You know how in New York there's a lot of scaffolding? I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck.

My childhood was as conventional as you could get. I think I probably created 'Arcadia' with a certain amount of wishful thinking. I would have loved to have more looseness and freedom and community.

Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.

Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.