"Another strong stylist that I imitated for a while was a woman named Joy Williams who had a short story collection called Taking Care. She has such a singular voice. It hasn’t really changed over the years. I remember she was talking about a girl having a fantasy about her beau and she said, ‘He was feeling fine, and fancy too.’ It was such music to me."

"It offers a way of re-ordering ordinary experience. It argues that when we perceive the actions and intentions of others, we tend to make mistakes. We see things that aren’t there and we make predictions that we ought not to make: we privilege the ‘person’ and we discount the influence of the ‘situation.’ It speaks, in short, to the very broadest questions of human perception."

"I read “Self-Reliance” when I was 17 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the ‘50s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgement, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work."