The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.