In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.

I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.