Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.