A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

The purpose of our lives is to be happy.

Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.

There is a time of reckoning in all our lives.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.